Design of Mesh Enhancements to Airborne Links

The effectiveness of current and future tactical aircraft increasingly depends on their ability to exchange information. Existing waveforms must be enhanced with mesh networking capabilities to meet desired efficiency, flexibility, and reliability requirements expected of airborne networks. Several factors including budget and schedule constraints may require incremental and partial deployment, where upgraded nodes must be backward compatible. Beyond the basic interoperability concerns, it is also desirable that the presence of a subset of upgraded nodes in the network helps to improve the performance of other (legacy) nodes. In order to meet these objectives, we consider a set of mechanisms which facilitate partial or incremental node upgrades, while maintaining backward compatibility. The approach implements topology management and routing strategies in order to leverage mesh capabilities without a significant increase in control overheads. The performance improvements and tradeoffs are verified via simulation and evaluation of a proof-of-concept prototype on real radios.