Architecture and Routing Protocols for Airborne Internet Access

The passengers traveling in aircrafts demand for internet connectivity to effectively utilize their precious inflight time. Provision of internet services to airborne users at the same cost and of the same speed, it is being provided to the home users, is a critical challenge for the research community. In this regard, various solutions have been recently proposed in the literature, which involve satellite based solutions, direct Ground Station (GS) link based solutions, and mesh network based solutions etc. In this paper, inspired from land-mobile radio cellular networks, a new architecture for Airborne Internet Access (AIA) is proposed. Computer simulations are performed to evaluate the proposed architecture, while various routing algorithms are implemented and a thorough performance evaluation is conducted. Mean End-to-End (E2E) packet delay is used as performance metric in the presented analysis. Routing algorithms from two diverse classes of routing algorithms are selected for the analysis, viz: topology based and position based routing algorithms. In a scenario, when transmit message length is 1000 bytes, transmitter bit rate is 10 Mbps, communication range of nodes restricted to 10 km, velocity of aircrafts' mobility up to 250 m/s, and direction of motion of the aircrafts drawn from uniform distribution; the Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector Routing (AODV) algorithm is observed to outperform the Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing (GPSR) algorithm in terms of mean E2E delay. Moreover, effect of various network and physical parameters on the network performance is observed and various useful conclusions are drawn. The conducted analysis is useful in selection of appropriate routing algorithm for appropriate network conditions.