North Atlantic Inflight Internet Connectivity via Airborne Mesh Networking

• Main Authors: Daniel Medina, Felix Hoffmann, Francesco Rossetto, Carl-herbert Rokitansky
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.399.2594; http://elib.dlr.de/70302/1/North_Atlantic_Inflight_Internet_Connectivity_via_Airborne_Mesh_Networking.pdf

Abstract—The Airborne Internet is a vision of a large scale multihop wireless mesh network consisting of commercial passenger aircraft connected via long range highly directional air-to-air radio links. We propose a geographic load sharing strategy to fully exploit the total air-to-ground capacity available at any given time. When forwarding packets for a given destination, a node considers not one but a set of next hop candidates, and spreads traffic among them based on queue dynamics. In addition, load balancing is performed among Internet Gateways by using a congestionaware handover strategy. Our simulations using realistic North Atlantic air traffic reveal the potential of such a load sharing mechanism to approach the maximum theoretical throughput in the network. I.