Architecture and Algorithms for an Airborne Network

The U.S. Air Force currently is in the process of developing an Airborne Network (AN) to provide support to its combat aircrafts on a mission. The reliability needed for continuous operation of an AN is difficult to achieve through completely infrastructure-less mobile ad hoc networks. In this paper we first propose an architecture for an AN where airborne networking platforms (ANPs aircrafts, UAVs and satellites) form the backbone of the AN. In this architecture, the ANPs can be viewed as mobile base stations and the combat aircrafts on a mission as mobile clients. Availability of sufficient control over the movement pattern of the ANPs, enables the designer to develop a topologically stable backbone network. The combat aircrafts on a mission move through a space called air corridor. The goal of the AN design is to form a backbone network with the ANPs with two properties: (i) the backbone network remains connected at all times, even though the topology of the network changes with the movement of the ANPs, and (ii) the entire three dimensional space of the air corridor is under radio coverage at all times by the continuously moving ANPs. In addition to proposing an architecture for an AN, the contributions of the paper include, (i) development of an algorithm that finds the velocity and transmission range of the ANPs so that the dynamically changing backbone network remains connected at all times, (ii) development of a routing algorithm that ensures a connection between the source-destination node pair with the fewest number of path switching, (iii) given the dimensions of the air corridor and the radius of the coverage sphere associated with an ANP, development of an algorithm that finds the fewest number of ANPs required to provide complete coverage of the air corridor at all times, (iv) development of an algorithm that provides connected-coverage to the air corridor at all times, and (v) results of experimental evaluations of our algorithms, (vi) development of a visualization tool that depicts the movement patterns of the ANPs and the resulting dynamic graph and the coverage volume of the backbone network.