The bridge, rising 70 meters (230 feet) above the sea will have six lanes and two railway lines. Its longest span will be about 3km, almost 1km longer than the world's longest Akashi-Kaikyo bridge built in 1998 in Japan.
The construction works worth $10 billion are due to start in 2012 and completed by 2025.
The idea of building the Java-Sumatra bridge first emerged in 1965, but was not put into action following the 1997 Asian economic crisis.
Building a suspension bridge 30 km long in a region rocked by earthquakes will be an engineering achievement, experts said.
Indonesia is located in the seismically active Pacific Ring of Fire, and suffers frequent earthquakes, as well as tsunamis set off by powerful underwater tremors.
In September Sumatra was hit by a series of strong aftershocks which left more than twenty people dead.
On December 26, 2004, an earthquake off the coast of Sumatra, measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale, generated a huge tsunami that killed more than 275,000 in a dozen nations, the majority in Indonesia's Aceh province.
