Future trends for IP services over FAA telecommunications infrastructure

The Center for Advanced Aviation System Development (CAASD) of The MITRE Corporation, in conjunction with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), is examining growth in IP traffic over the FAA Telecommunication Infrastructure (FTI) network. This growth is expected to take an up-turn over the next 15 years. The rapid growth of IP traffic will pose a challenge to the FTI program to meet the future IP demand in a timely manner and at a minimum cost with the high levels of reliability, performance and security required for National Airspace System (NAS) services. The purpose of this paper is to quantify the expected growth in FAA IP traffic demand in the next 2 years. We also suggest consideration of a network concept, consistent with commercial Wide Area Network (WAN) enterprise practice, whereby IP traffic capacity at the trunk side of the service delivery point (SDP) can be sized less than the aggregate of all services at the port side of the SDP, resulting savings in telecommunication cost without impacting service delivery and without introducing excessive application layer delays. This concept is based on the observation that modern IP network architecture is increasingly taking advantage of WAN acceleration appliances to maximize applications delivery and minimize applications delay as opposed to simply increasing IP access capacity. Once this network concept is introduced, solutions are proposed to support FAA applications with minimum delays while economizing on network capacity requirements. Commercial off the shelf (COTS) products to perform WAN optimization such as data, transport, application and management streamlining are also discussed.