Distributed and dynamic spectrum management in airborne networks

Abstract

Airborne network plays an important role in operations of Air Force. Due to the rapidly-changing topologies, limited wireless communication spectrum, latency, and priorities of tasks, it is vitally important to have dynamic spectrum management between aircrafts and base station in airborne networks. Particularly, we encounter two major challenges: (1) uncertainty about channel quality, in terms of the long-term channel statistics and real-time channel states; (2) the dynamics and the possibly correlated nature of channel quality of different aircrafts. To address these two challenges, we propose a distributed framework for spectrum management in airborne networks, which includes: 1) channel quality prediction based on correlation of channel quality among aircrafts; 2) task scheduling in the aircraft. With real-world trace data, we conduct extensive experiments. Our simulation results show that our design can effectively optimize the channel utilization in airborne network.