In the upcoming years the localization of mobile phones  or PDAs will become the main market driver in the area of personal navigation applications. These trends converge in the U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s E-911 mandate and the E-112 initiative of the European Commission that

requires network carriers to provide location or geo-coding of emergency callers who are using wireless handsets. Taken all this into account, an important step into the market for Galileo is the in-time availability of hybrid Galileo/GPS  receivers in combination with cellular network positioning capability for consumer applications. This is the main idea behind the GAWAIN project – the development of an integrated GNSS/UMTS receiver, which provides seamless indoor/outdoor navigation and communication capability, using GPS/Galileo and 3G/UMTS for mass market applications.

The same applies for the next generation of satellite navigation systems; GPS is undergoing a modernization phase (GPS III) and the number of frequencies available to civil users is increased from one to three. The definition of Galileo foresees at least four different frequencies, some of which overlap with GPS. All of these new signal structures tend to have an increased bandwidth compared to the older standards.

The targeted applications such as combined Galileo/GPS and UMTS processing and new, advanced and highly demanding processing techniques, like indoor positioning continuously crave more processing power.

The objective of GAWAIN, namely to provide a solution that combines communication with satellite navigation therefore must call for a special solution. 

The goal of GAWAIN may only be reached with the capability to completely configure the processor through software ('Software defined Radio') and the 'ReConfigurable Processor' (RCP) approach. Thus, another objective here is to develop algorithms able to deal with these requirements.