Research On Routing Protocol For Civil Aeronautical Ad Hoc Network

Higher requirements for the civil aviation communication system have beenproposed because of the rapid development of the global aviation industry in recentyears. It is urgent to find a suitable global integrative and space, air, earth integrativecivil aviation communication system solution for the development of the global aviationindustry. Aeronautical Ad Hoc Network(AANET) is widely concerned by many of theworld’s scientific research institutions and researchers as a candidate technology likelyto be used in the new civil aviation communication system.As satellite based network has high cost, large delay and very limited capacitydisadvantages, as well as ground station based network can’t support the transatlanticflight due to its limited coverage, AANET is expected to become an significantsupplement of them. The existing ground Mobile Ad Hoc Networks(MANET) routingprotocols are not suitable for aeronautical communication environment and the existingAANET routing protocols can’t be used in the AANET for civil aviationcommunication due to their network target and network characteristics are different.With the guiding ideology that aircraft try to access the internet or the backbonenetwork through ground stations by using air-air links and ground-air links as far aspossible and alternatively using satellite links only when the path between the aircraftand ground stations is not available, the author study the civil AANET routing protocolrelated theory and technology combining the research of project “Networking and keytechnology research of transatlantic aviation broadband mobile communication” whichis supported by national natural science foundation of china. According to thecharacteristics of high-speed movement of nodes, high dynamic network topology andlarge network space span in the civil aviation communication network, the researchmainly focus on network robustness, high dynamic network topology adaptability,network QoS and routing security problem. The main work and achievements of thepaper are as follows:1) An optimal QoS paths between aircraft and ground stations search strategywhich based on the ideology of aircraft have priority and the optimal path to access basestation is proposed to achieve efficient maintenance of the routes between aircraft andground stations according to the network target and characteristics of civil aviationcommunication network. In the route maintenance strategy, ground stations broadcast routing maintenance messages periodically. Aircraft nodes evaluate and select next hopof the aircraft to ground stations route according to the received routing maintenancemessages and simultaneously forward path information if necessary. Ground station toaircraft routs are built and updated in the process of the aircraft send packages to groundstation.2) A reconfigurable integrated route quality evaluation mechanism for the civilAANET which based on the research and analysis of factors affecting the quality of theroutes in civil aviation communication is proposed for optimal QoS path searching andnetwork QoS guarantee. Number of hops, route delay, route duration, packet loss rateand residual bandwidth are considered in the mechanism. And all these factors areperceived and quantized in the network in real-time. The final mechanism is setaccording to the needs of the path for civil aviation communication network traffics.3) Due to high dynamic topology and uneven aircraft node distributioncharacteristics of aeronautical communications network. Interferences among nodes inhigh density regions affect network performance seriously. The best node neighborconfiguration distributed dynamic topology optimization algorithm which based on theideology of limit node transmitting power according to the neighbor configuration withthe premise of give priority to ensuring aircraft can connect to ground station isproposed in order to improve the network performance. The algorithm dynamicallyadjust nodes transmitting power based on the configuration of its neighbors in neighbormaintenance process to optimize the network topology and improve networkperformance.4) Due to MANET is vulnerable to attack, while safety performance requirementof the aeronautical communications network is very high. A neighbor trust evaluationrouting security strategy which based on the ideology of evaluate node credibility fromthe network behavior of the node is proposed according to the exist threats in routinglayer of civil AANET. The strategy is carried out in the process of neighbormaintenance. The network behaviors of a node are monitored by its neighbors, and onlytrusted neighbors can be used for data forwarding.All the achievements of the paper are simulated on the builded civil aviationcommunication simulation scenarios. The results show that the routing protocol whichbased on the achievements of the paper is suitable to civilian aviation communicationsenvironment, can ensure aircraft have priority and the optimal path to access basestation, and also have better dynamic topology adaptability, routing stability, the ability of network congestion preventing and higher safety when comprised with AODV andGPSR which proposed for high dynamic topology network.