A Geographic Routing Strategy for North Atlantic In-Flight Internet Access Via Airborne Mesh Networking

• Published in: IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
• Main Authors: Medina, Daniel, Hoffmann, Felix, Rossetto, Francesco, Rokitansky, Carl-Herbert
• Format: Other Non-Article Part of Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 2011
• Subjects: Nachrichtensysteme; North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://elib.dlr.de/72149/; https://elib.dlr.de/72149/1/Daniel-TNET-A_Geographic_Routing_Strategy_for_North_Atlantic_In_Flight_Internet_Access_Via_Airborne_Mesh_Networking.pdf; http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=6086581&abstractAccess=no&userType=

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 congestion-aware handover strategy. Our simulations using realistic North Atlantic air traffic demonstrate the ability of such a load sharing mechanism to approach the maximum theoretical throughput in the network.