Geographic Load Share Routing in the Airborne Internet

Abstract

The North Atlantic Corridor constitutes the most interesting scenario for a real deployment of airborne mesh networking technology to provide faster and cheaper inflight internet connectivity during oceanic flight than is currently possible via satellite. In the so-called Airborne Internet, arguably the largest and most dynamic wireless mesh network ever envisioned, all internet traffic enters/leaves the airborne mesh network via a time-varying number of short-lived air-to-ground (A2G) links, which consequently pose a capacity bottleneck, limiting the maximum data throughput that can be offered to each user (aircraft). Thus, it is essential that the routing strategy keeps a balance between the capacity and traffic load of each A2G link. Achieving this balance with minimal overhead in a highly mobile network where link capacity and traffic demand are constantly fluctuating is a challenging task. Our proposed solution, Geographic Load Share Routing (GLSR), requires only the exchange of the aircraft’s position, and reacts quickly to fluctuations in traffic demand and link capacity by using instantaneous buffer size information local to the forwarding node. Our simulation results using realistic transatlantic air traffic underscore the importance of a load balancing strategy for the Airborne Internet and demonstrate GLSR’s ability to share the total A2G bandwidth fairly among all airborne users. By exploiting the full capacity available at each access point and adaptively resizing their geographic jurisdiction to account for congestion, GLSR achieves a per-user throughput close to 90% of the theoretical maximum. This is in stark contrast to the performance of shortest path routing, with a throughput below 20% of the maximum.