An iterative sort based resource scheduling for long distance airborne tactical communication in hub network

Abstract

Recently, in order to achieve network centric warfare (NCW), common data link (CDL) has been considered as a key component to exchange tactical/video data in airborne tactical network (ATN). Accordingly, some enhanced CDLs, which has high capacity and networking technology, has been developed around the world. In various network topologies for enhanced CDLs, hub network is a typical topology because of simple implementation complexity. Also, in order to support multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) simultaneously within limited bandwidth, hybrid frequency division multiple access (FDMA)/time division multiple access (TDMA) can be considered. However, due to different round-trip time (RTT) and data traffic size of each UAV, idle time resource and unnecessary packet transmission delay can occur in hub network, and they can reduce efficiency of hub network in long distance communication. Therefore, in this paper, we propose RTT/traffic size based UAV resource scheduling. The proposed scheme selects time/frequency resource of UAVs by using iterative ascending sort algorithm and traffic based weighting method, which uses gradually decreased weighting value per sorting iteration. We verify that the proposed scheme can improve data rate and packet delay performance.