AeroMRP: A Multipath Reliable Transport Protocol for Aeronautical Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

In order to support Internet of Things, an aeronautical ad hoc network (AANET) has been proposed to solve the problem of air information isolated island. AANET is a special type of heterogeneous ad hoc network between commercial aircraft to share data and in-flight Internet access. Today’s civil airliners are typically equipped with multiple advanced network interfaces, which can form multiple independent communication paths between the source and the destination nodes in AANETs. Thus, users expect to utilize multiple networking interfaces of airliners simultaneously to support data transfer services. In this paper, we present a multipath reliable transport protocol for AANETs, called AeroMRP, which exploits path diversity provided by heterogeneous aeronautical networks. AeroMRP takes advantage of raptor codes to restore from packet loss in the aeronautical network environments while reducing the impact of the head-of-line blocking issue in the networks with multiple paths. A redundancy rate selection algorithm is adopted to determine the redundancy on the fly by considering the characteristics of the target applications and the time-varying aeronautical networks. Moreover, AeroMRP implements feedback-based packet scheduling considering not only aeronautical network status but also the acknowledgment scheme in congestion control for better use of different paths. We evaluate the performance of AeroMRP by ns-3 under a variety of simulation scenarios. The simulations demonstrate that AeroMRP can provide efficient and reliable data transmission services in heterogeneous multipath AANETs.