Distributed Mobility Anchoring in the ATN/IPS

Abstract

The ICAO Communications Panel – Data Communications Infrastructure Group, IPS Mobility Sub-Group of Working Group I is working to update the provisions for mobility as specified in ICAO Doc 9896, Manual on the Aeronautical Telecommunication Network (ATN) using Internet Protocol Suite (IPS) Standards and Protocols [1].At the 2016 ICNS conference a paper on Multi-homing in the ATN/IPS [2] described how Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) [3] with extensions for multiple care-of addresses and flow bindings could be used as the global mobility management protocol for the ATN/IPS. The MIPv6 model in this paper was Centralized Mobility Management.This paper extends the multi-homing paper with an approach to distributed mobility anchoring. The approach meets the key requirement of Distributed Mobility Management to enable traffic to avoid traversing a single mobility anchor far from an optimal route. [4] This is especially true in ATC and other aviation environments where there should not be a constraint that an aircraft must communicate via a single Home Agent in its home region; for example, when the aircraft is flying in another ICAO region and being controlled by ATC or operated by AOC in that region. The approach uses a BGP overlay network that employs the BGP concept of confederations. Using the BGP overlay an aircraft is able to communicate with a global mobility anchor in the region in which it is flying. In addition the approach introduces the concept of access network mobility anchors at the Access Network Gateways for terrestrial and satellite access networks. These access network anchors permit ground ATC and AOC correspondent nodes to communicate directly with the aircraft bypassing the regional global mobility anchor. This is effectively a form of route optimization but it is performed in the network instead of placing an unnecessary routing burden on the correspondent nodes.