Explicit topology management for continental-scale airborne networks

Large-scale high-capacity communication networks among airborne platforms are quickly becoming a reality. Today, both Google and Facebook are seeking to form networks between high flying balloons and drones in an effort to provide Internet connections from the upper atmosphere to users on the ground. These airborne networks, that will likely use directional communication links between nodes to achieve high rates over long distances, present new networking challenges. One such challenge is the fact that the topology of these networks must be explicitly and constantly managed, ensuring that each directional data link is always pointed at and connected with the appropriate neighbor to yield an acceptable global topology. In this work we present several topology generation algorithms that can be used by a topology management framework to manage the topology of a continental-scale airborne network in a distributed manner. We give a detailed analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of these algorithms, based on their performance on numerous sets of nodes of various densities. We then simulate the topology management and routing with a geographic routing protocol in a network made up of hundreds of commercial aircraft in the continental United States, utilizing actual aircraft position data.