Performance issues in Aircraft Access to the National Airspace SWIM program

The System Wide Information Management (SWIM) program is one of the critical components in the Federal Aviation Administration´s (FAA) NextGen project. This investigates some of the challenges that arise during communication between the Electronic Flight Bag (EFB) and the Data Management System (DMS). The FAA has identified nine operational scenarios (OS) detailing information exchange within the context of the AAtS between the DMS and the aircraft. The FAA has also identified three technical scenarios (TS) for communication between an aircraft and the DMS for conveying the NAS information. This study is limited to the downlink (information from the aircraft to the DMS) portion of the EFB-DMS interaction. Additionally, we do not investigate NAS-DMS interaction. We implemented a replicated network infrastructure to mimic the functionality of the Aircraft Access to SWIM (AAtS) and the SWIM components relevant to the research. In this environment, the behavior of the entire system is emulated with approximated specifications. We implemented three messaging patterns (MPs), namely, DMS Hosting Request-Response Web Service, DMS Hosting Pub-Sub Service using Java Messaging Service (JMS), and DMS Hosting Pub-Sub with Web Service Notification in the replicated network and tested them against recommended OS-TS combinations. Several message sizes and frequencies of occurrence were used for testing selected combinations. We performed the tests using three different data sizes under full bandwidth contention and no bandwidth contention. Our tests suggest that the selected combinations can work and deliver the desired performance within the available data link bandwidth. The test outcomes also assist in determining which OS-TS-MP combinations are optimal.