Towards a mission planning toolbox for the Airborne Network: Optimizing ground coverage under connectivity constraints

The airborne network (AN) is a constellation of networked aircrafts flying in periodic orbits. AN is an enabling technology for network centric warfare for the military, autonomous air traffic control for commercial aviation and for providing Internet access over a broad urban area. AN is a highly dynamic environment and presents challenges that have not been addressed in traditional wire-line or wireless MANET research. Wireless links in AN are quasi-persistent and break due to platform banking and antenna shadowing. In this paper, the objective is to deploy airborne nodes so that they provide ground nodes with high data upload capacity while making sure that a minimal topology within the backbone airborne network is always maintained. For the sake of simplicity of presentation we make a few assumptions on the trajectories of the airborne nodes. We verify our assumptions against a well studied airborne network deployment scenario. Using tools from convex optimization we determine optimal locations of airborne nodes for three different scenarios. We present our results graphically and illustrate them using examples.