A simulation analysis of nodes mobility and traffic load aware routing strategy in aeronautical ad hoc networks

Abstract

Recently, there has been a clear trend towards the application of the ad hoc networking technology in the civil aviation communication system, and then a novel research field of aeronautical ad hoc networks (AANET) has arisen. Researchers have showed that it is possible to set up a mobile ad hoc network among the free flight airliners, thus providing a multi-hop communication link between the airliner and the ground base station. Through this communication link, air passengers can access Internet with low latency and cheap charges. So the commonly used satellite communication in free flight airliners may be replaced by AANET, as the satellite communication is costly and the transmission delay is large. Compared with the normal ad hoc networks, the airliners in AANET move at a very high speed, typically 700km/h to 1000km/h. So the multi-hop communications in AANET are extremely unstable as the network topology changes frequently. Meanwhile, the airliners which are near to the ground base station suffer from a heavy traffic load, as they forward the data traffic to and from the ground base station for other airliners. To solve these problems, researchers have proposed many kinds of link stability prediction strategies and traffic load aware routing protocols, but none of them simultaneously take into account both of these two problems. In this paper, we firstly implement a nodes mobility and traffic Load aware routing strategy in GloMoSim simulator for AANET. In this routing strategy, we adopt the Doppler value which is calculated by Doppler frequency shift as the nodes mobility metric, and adopt the length of the transmission queue of the nodes as the traffic load metric. Then we give a detailed analysis of the performance of the routing strategy through simulation experiments. Simulation results show the effectiveness of this routing strategy.