Throughput and delay of single-hop and two-hop aeronautical communication networks

Aeronautical communication networks (ACN) is an emerging concept in which aeronautical stations (AS) are considered as a part of multi-tier network for the future wireless communication system. An AS could be a commercial plane, helicopter, or any other low orbit station, i.e., Unmanned air vehicle, high altitude platform. The goal of ACN is to provide high throughput and cost effective communication network for aeronautical applications (i.e., Air traffic control (ATC), air traffic management (ATM) communications, and commercial in-flight Internet activities), and terrestrial networks by using aeronautical platforms as a backbone. In this paper, we investigate the issues about connectivity, throughput, and delay in ACN. First, topology of ACN is presented as a simple mobile ad hoc network and connectivity analysis is provided. Then, by using information obtained from connectivity analysis, we investigate two communication models, i.e., single-hop and two-hop, in which each source AS is communicating with its destination AS with or without the help of intermediate relay AS, respectively. In our throughput analysis, we use the method of finding the maximum number of concurrent successful transmissions to derive ACN throughput upper bounds for the two communication models. We conclude that the two-hop model achieves greater throughput scaling than the single-hop model for ACN and multi-hop models cannot achieve better throughput scaling than two-hop model. Furthermore, since delay issue is more salient in two-hop communication, we characterize the delay performance and derive the closed-form average end-to-end delay for the two-hop model. Finally, computer simulations are performed and it is shown that ACN is robust in terms of throughput and delay performances.