1 research outputs found
Architecture and Algorithms for an Airborne Network
The U.S. Air Force currently is in the process of developing an Airborne
Network (AN) to provide support to its combat aircrafts on a mission. The
reliability needed for continuous operation of an AN is difficult to achieve
through completely infrastructure-less mobile ad hoc networks. In this paper we
first propose an architecture for an AN where airborne networking platforms
(ANPs - aircrafts, UAVs and satellites) form the backbone of the AN. In this
architecture, the ANPs can be viewed as mobile base stations and the combat
aircrafts on a mission as mobile clients. The combat aircrafts on a mission
move through a space called air corridor. The goal of the AN design is to form
a backbone network with the ANPs with two properties: (i) the backbone network
remains connected at all times, even though the topology of the network changes
with the movement of the ANPs, and (ii) the entire 3D space of the air corridor
is under radio coverage at all times by the continuously moving ANPs.
In addition to proposing an architecture for an AN, the contributions of the
paper include, development of an algorithm that finds the velocity and
transmission range of the ANPs so that the dynamically changing backbone
network remains connected at all times, development of a routing algorithm that
ensures a connection between the source-destination node pair with the fewest
number of path switching, given the dimensions of the air corridor and the
radius of the coverage sphere associated with an ANP, development of an
algorithm that finds the fewest number of ANPs required to provide complete
coverage of the air corridor at all times, development of an algorithm that
provides connected-coverage to the air corridor at all times, and development
of a visualization tool that depicts the movement patterns of the ANPs and the
resulting dynamic graph and the coverage volume of the backbone network