Network Architecture and Wireless Ad Hoc Routing for Airborne Internet Services

The passengers traveling in aircraft require access to the internet to effectively utilizing their precious in-flight time. Providing internet services to such users with similar specifications (i.e., speed, cost, latency, etc) as that of being provided to terrestrial users is an open research problem. To this end, various attractive solutions are proposed in the literature which includes satellite-based, extended terrestrial network-based, and ad hoc networking-based solutions—to name a few. In this paper, inspired by the widely deployed terrestrial radio cellular networks, an architectural advancement is proposed which together with ad hoc networking renders airborne internet services to remote aircraft. Simulation analysis is performed to evaluate the potential of the proposed network architecture, while two notable routing algorithms are implemented and analyzed. In the conducted analysis, mean End-to-End (E2E) packet delay, Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), and throughput are used as key performance metrics. Routing protocols from two diverse classes are implemented, which are topology-based and position-based protocols. In a scenario when transmitting message length, bit-rate, coverage radius of nodes, the velocity of nodes, and direction of motion of nodes is set as 4000 bytes, 300 Mbps, 140 km, up to 250 m/s, and randomly drawn from the uniform distribution, respectively, the Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing (GPSR) algorithm is observed to outperform the Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector Routing (AODV) algorithm. However, converse behaviour is observed along with an increase in the network load and the velocity of routing (intermediate) and destination aerial nodes. Moreover, the impact of changes in various other important network and physical parameters on the network performance is also investigated and various useful recommendations are made. The conducted analysis is of high significance for determining a suitable choice of routing protocol in a given network and nodes’ mobility conditions in real-time.