North Atlantic Inflight Internet Connectivity via Airborne Mesh Networking

The Airborne Internet is a vision of a large scale multihop wireless mesh network consisting of commercial passenger aircraft connected via long range highly directional air-to-air radio links. We propose a geographic load sharing strategy to fully exploit the total air-to-ground capacity available at any given time. When forwarding packets for a given destination, a node considers not one but a set of next hop candidates, and spreads traffic among them based on queue dynamics. In addition, load balancing is performed among Internet Gateways by using a congestion-aware handover strategy. Our simulations using realistic North Atlantic air traffic reveal the potential of such a load sharing mechanism to approach the maximum theoretical throughput in the network.