Throughput and delay analysis in Aeronautical Data Networks

Evergrowing consumer demand for wireless connectivity is opening a new paradigm of communications, “Aeronautical Data Networks (ADN)”. The desire is to provide high throughput and cost effective data network not only for an aeronautical applications, but also for terrestrial networks by using aeronautical platforms as a backbone. An aeronautical station (AS) could be a commercial plane, a helicopter, or any other low orbit station, i.e., Unmanned Air Vehicle, High Altitude Platforms. In this paper, we study an aeronautical broadband wireless access scheme to provide throughput and delay analysis for ADN. First, a simple topology of ADN is presented as a mobile ad-hoc network (MANET). A two-hop network model is considered where each packet makes two hops, one from the source AS to a relay AS and one from the relay AS to the destination AS. Then, based on the method of finding the maximum number of concurrent successful transmissions, the ADN throughput upper bound is obtained. Closed-form end-to-end delay expression is also derived, to provide a general ADN system performance in terms of throughput and delay. Numerical results are presented, which show the alignment with our theoretical analysis.