A Combined Topology Formation and Rate Allocation Algorithm for Aeronautical Ad Hoc Networks

This paper addresses the problem of providing internet connectivity to aircraft flying above the ocean without using satellite connectivity given the lack of ground network infrastructure in the relevant oceanic areas. Is it possible to guarantee a minimum flow rate to each aircraft flying over an ocean by forming an aeronautical ad hoc network and connecting that network to internet via a set of limited number of ground base stations at the coast as anchor points? We formulated the problem as mixed-integer-linear programming (MILP) to maximize the number of aircraft with flow data rate above a certain threshold. Since this multi-commodity flow problem is at least NP-complete, we propose a two-phase heuristic algorithm to efficiently form topology and assign flows to each aircraft by maximizing the minimum flow. The performance of the heuristic algorithm is evaluated over the North Atlantic Corridor, heuristic performs only 8% less than the optimal result with low densities. In high network densities, the connectivity percentage changes from 70% to 40% under 75 Mbps data rate threshold. Furthermore, the connectivity percentage is investigated for different network parameters such as altitude and compared to upper and lower bounds and a baseline algorithm.