Dynamic Virtual Topology Aided Networking and Routing for Aeronautical Ad-Hoc Networks

Aeronautical Ad-hoc Networks (AANETs) have been proposed as the promising complement to terrestrial networks for promoting the global interconnection to provide in-flight network service, emergency communication, vessel traffic service, etc. However, the large network scale of AANETs may induce severe synchronization overhead when the traditional topology-based networking algorithms are adopted. Moreover, the high-dynamic topology and changeable flight routes make the existing position-based routing algorithms suffer loop routing and forwarding failure. Motivated by these problems, this paper aims at developing efficient and low-cost networking and routing algorithms relying on the concept of dynamic virtual topology which organizes the disordered topology of AANETs into a structural and simplified one. The basic idea is that each connected aircraft is assigned with a unique and sequentially increased Virtual Identifier (VID) and thus all the connected aircrafts are organized into a virtual cluster consisting of one trunk and several branches. An event-driven synchronization mechanism is leveraged for maintaining the virtual topology as well as relieving the communication burden imposed by periodical broadcasting. By jointly considering the geographic locations and the virtual locations of aircrafts, we formulate the routing problem in AANETs as a weighted distance minimization problem, and further propose a novel routing algorithm, namely Trunk-Branch Cooperation aided Routing (TBCR) algorithm. Specifically, TBCR employs the geographic greedy forwarding strategy for enhancing its flexibility and boosts the routing efficiency by adopting the loop-free virtual topology based local forwarding. For extending the networking and routing algorithms to the global range, a multi-domain routing solution is also provided. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed Virtual Topology based Networking (VTN) cooperated with TBCR can reduce at least 30% average end-to-end transmission delay in large-scale AANETs and provide more than 90% lower synchronization overhead than the existing solutions.