Chapter The Airborne Internet

Mineralogy & gem

The Airborne Internet

Mineralogy & gem

Capacity Dimensioning for Aeronautical Communications in North Atlantic Corridor

In the context of the Internet everywhere paradigm, aircraft passengers expect to get connectivity during flights. Several solutions based either on cellular networks in continental area or on satellite links have been designed and even deployed for some of them. But to face the increasing number of users and expected services, a migration to future satellite system such as Inmarsat's Ka band Global Xpress system have been planned. The considered geographical area of the present study is the north Atlantic corridor. In this service zone, the specific structure of aeronautical traffic must be taken into account. NAT (North Atlantic Tracks) are oceanic routes between North America and Europe that are periodically defined considering weather and wind conditions. This explains why the exact locations of the tracks change daily according to weather and also traffic demands. On each continent, specific air traffic control is provided in order to manage entrance and movement along these tracks. The proposed study makes the assumption of a flexible global coverage provided by multi beam Ka band satellites that operate in geosynchronous orbit. Aircraft flying in the north Atlantic corridor use the system in order to offer in-flight connectivity for airline passengers. Doing so, passengers may access common Internet services, namely web browsing, electronic mail, or file transfer. More specific applications for pilots and companies are also taken in consideration enhanced with new services such as real time black box data streaming. In order to assess induced traffic load and instantaneous required capacities in each spot beam, a simulation model has been specifically developed by ENAC and ISAE with Opnet Modeler software

Secure Point-to-Point Long-Distance Multi-Hop Connections in a Dense Airplane Mesh-Network using LDACS

The capacity of current aeronautical datalinks is reaching its limits and becomes a hindrance for growth of worldwide civil aviation. To modernize Air Traffic Management (ATM) and digitize aeronautical communications, successors for current technologies are being researched and deployed. The envisioned successor for the VHF Datalink mode 2 (VDLm2) for European air traffic is the L-band Digital Aeronautical Communications System (LDACS). Similar to VDLm2, LDACS is a terrestrial, cellular Air-Ground (A/G) communications system. Contrary to VDLm2, LDACS shall also provide an Air-Air (A/A) communication mode in the future, called LDACS A/A, which operates in a radius of 200 Nautical Miles (NM) for aircraft above altitude of 3000m. Long-distance multi-hop A/A communications could be used to extend the range of LDACS ground stations into oceanic and remote areas, increasing the utility of the terrestrial infrastructure. While LDACS A/G offers sound cybersecurity measures, the development of such for an LDACS A/A extension is currently in its infancy and needs to be investigated thoroughly. One particular design constraint for cybersecurity for aeronautical multi-hop A/A networks is the topology of the underlying mesh network. The objectives of this paper are to investigate (1) the number of concurrent aircraft that are within communication range to each other and (2) the number of hops necessary to cover given distances and (3) to propose possible cybersecurity approaches for LDACS A/A in particular. With actual flight traces data from the OpenSky database for European air traffic, we identify high fluctuations of results based on the time of day and region. The following results were obtained: (1) concurrent aircraft are ranging from 0 to 258, (2) on an exemplary route from Istanbul to Dublin, ranging roughly 3000km, 9 hops were necessary on average with stable routes lasting 1m 21s on average and (3) up to 19% of the total stable connection time is used for establishing a secure Peer-to-Peer (P2P) tunnel via mutual authentication between all hops

Aeronautical Ad Hoc Network for Civil Aviation

Aeronautical communication systems are constantly evolving in order to handle the always increasing flow of data generated by civil aviation. In this article we first present communication systems currently used for en-route aircraft. We then propose Aeronautical Ad hoc NETwork (AANET) as a complementary communication system and demonstrate its connectivity and assess the throughput by simulations based on real aircraft trajectories over the French sky and over the Atlantic ocean

ns-3 Airborne Network Simulation

Airborne networks, consisting of aircraft-to-aircraft and aircraft-to-ground communications, are critical for future aviation information systems and remote Internet access. A major knowledge gap, however, is the reliability and security challenges of airborne networks in such civilian application domains. Field tests and emulations of airborne networks are expensive undertakings and would be better informed by simulation findings. This paper, hence, reports about a study that aims to simulate airborne networks to understand and characterize their performance and risks. We choose ns-3, an open source network simulation tool, to construct and evaluate airborne networks. We implement 3-D mobility models in ns-3 to capture the realistic movement of aircraft and assess the performance of elemental airborne network configurations in terms of metrics such as throughput and packet drop ratio. We conclude with lessons learnt and some future research directions

Minimum-Delay Routing for Integrated Aeronautical Ad Hoc Networks Relying on Real Flight Data in the North-Atlantic Region

Relying on multi-hop communication techniques, aeronautical ad hoc networks (AANETs) seamlessly integrate ground base stations (BSs) and satellites into aircraft communications for enhancing the on-demand connectivity of planes in the air. The goal of the paper is to assess the performance of the classic shortest-path routing algorithm in the context of the real flight data collected in the North-Atlantic Region. Specifically, in this integrated AANET context we investigate the shortest-path routing problem with the objective of minimizing the total delay of the in-flight connection from the ground BS subject to certain minimum-rate constraints for all selected links in support of lowlatency and high-speed services. Inspired by the best-first search and priority queue concepts, we model the problem formulated by a weighted digraph and find the optimal route based on the shortest-path algorithm. Our simulation results demonstrate that aircraft-aided multi-hop communications are capable of reducing the total delay of satellite communications, when relying on real historical flight data

Hybrid Satellite-Terrestrial Communication Networks for the Maritime Internet of Things: Key Technologies, Opportunities, and Challenges

With the rapid development of marine activities, there has been an increasing number of maritime mobile terminals, as well as a growing demand for high-speed and ultra-reliable maritime communications to keep them connected. Traditionally, the maritime Internet of Things (IoT) is enabled by maritime satellites. However, satellites are seriously restricted by their high latency and relatively low data rate. As an alternative, shore & island-based base stations (BSs) can be built to extend the coverage of terrestrial networks using fourth-generation (4G), fifth-generation (5G), and beyond 5G services. Unmanned aerial vehicles can also be exploited to serve as aerial maritime BSs. Despite of all these approaches, there are still open issues for an efficient maritime communication network (MCN). For example, due to the complicated electromagnetic propagation environment, the limited geometrically available BS sites, and rigorous service demands from mission-critical applications, conventional communication and networking theories and methods should be tailored for maritime scenarios. Towards this end, we provide a survey on the demand for maritime communications, the state-of-the-art MCNs, and key technologies for enhancing transmission efficiency, extending network coverage, and provisioning maritime-specific services. Future challenges in developing an environment-aware, service-driven, and integrated satellite-air-ground MCN to be smart enough to utilize external auxiliary information, e.g., sea state and atmosphere conditions, are also discussed