Transport

Satcoms in Support of Transport on European Roads 'SISTER'.
The "Satcoms in Support of Transport on European Roads" (SISTER) project was a €10.4 million, three year long integrated project co-financed by the European Commission Directorate-General Enterprise and Industry. The aim of the project was to promote the integration of satellite and terrestrial communication with satellite navigation to enable use in a variety of road transport applications.  The project consortium included a number of key players in road transport applications, including ERTICO, Efkon, Navteq, Autoliv Electronics, Volvo Technology, Wireless Car and a number of stakeholders in the satellite communications and navigation communities.
Although satellite communications services will not replace the need for terrestrial services, they can act in a complementary fashion and lead to a better overall solution. Examples include:

• High-availability applications in which communications coverage must be comprehensive, such as emergency applications;
• High-reliability applications in which guaranteed quality of service is required, such as dangerous goods tracking;
• High-capacity applications in which the terrestrial network infrastructure may be too expensive to distribute large volumes of data to many users using point-to-point communications, such as digital maps updating.

The project included three main streams of activity: an assessment for the requirements of intelligent transport applications and the designed potential of solutions involving satellite communications and navigation technologies; a practical stream developing an integrated satellite communications transceiver and performance demonstrations of potentially interesting applications; and a standards activity worked in partnership with committees from the International Standards Organisation (ISO), which developed a satellite component for a new transport communications standard called CALM.