Cloud based VoIP Application in Aircraft Data Networks

Abstract

There has been a high increase in air traffic for the past ten years and to attract more customers many in-flight facilities are introduced by the carriers. These include Video-OnDemand, use of Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) etc. To provide these facilities the VoIP technology is used more often. But maintaining VoIP infrastructure along with the Aircraft Data Network equipment’s will be more cumbersome for the carriers, along with the added infrastructure cost. Thus an improvised architecture has been proposed which helps carriers provide these facilities to the customers in a cost effective and reliable manner. Most of the aircraft communications to the ground rely on satellite for providing these services to the customers. The proposed method uses satellite communication along with cloud based VoIP to provide an efficient quality of service to the passengers. The ground stations used for satellite communication would be connected to a high speed Storage Area Network, to which the cloud network on which the VoIP application is running is also connected. So that whenever a passenger on the flight sends a message/data to the VoIP application first it would be send to the ground stations via the satellite which is then accessed through the SAN server, thus in turn providing faster, reliable and efficient communication to the customers.