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An Ad-Hoc Mesh Network for Flight-Deck Interval Management of Airplanes

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Internet of Vehicles. Technologies and Services for Smart Cities (IOV 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10689))

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Abstract

This article reports an investigation of the information flow among airplanes and describes a new digital communication protocol that uses ad-hoc mesh networking technology. The proposed protocol can be operated using existing aircraft hardware and achieves highly reliable communication with a short period of time (a few tens of seconds). Simulations confirm that more than 200 [octet] of information can be shared with 98[%] of aircraft within a specified area.

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Acknowledgment

This research was supported by Electronic Navigation Research Institute, Japan, and JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 15K00294. We thank Stuart Jenkinson, Ph.D., from Edanz Group (www.edanzediting.com/ac) for editing a draft of this manuscript.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Nagasaki, Nagasaki, Japan

    Ichi Kanaya

  2. Electronic Navigation Research Institute, Tokyo, Japan

    Eri Itoh

Authors
  1. Ichi Kanaya
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  2. Eri Itoh
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ichi Kanaya .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. National Dong Hwa University, Hualien, Taiwan

    Sheng-Lung Peng

  2. National Dong Hwa University, Hualien, Taiwan

    Guan-Ling Lee

  3. Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Reinhard Klette

  4. Chung Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan

    Ching-Hsien Hsu

Appendices

A  Proposed Protocol

We describe the protocol proposed in this research in terms of the physical layer, datalink layer, network layer, and transport layer of the OSI reference model.

1.1 A.1  Physical Layer

In consideration of the feasibility of mounting this protocol on existing aircraft, we use the same frequency band as SSR (that is, the UHF band) to allow the possibility of diverting the SSR antenna.

As the existing SSR uses a simple pulse-based communication protocol, the communication band is very narrow. Therefore, a bandwidth of approximately 10 [kHz] with adjacent frequency as a carrier is available. We consider FM for its noise tolerance. In general, AM is used for its lower selectivity of voice communication channels in aircraft communication, but as this proposal is limited to digital communication, we adopt FM, which is more resistant to noise than AM.

1.2 A.2  Datalink Layer

The datalink layer transmits/receives data with 256 [octet] per packet. The contents of the data are as follows.

  • Packet header 4 [octet]. Magic number (constant for signal identification), flag indicating the packet property, information of 4 [octet] including reserved area. The packet property includes 1 [octet] information indicating the number of transfers.

  • Time code 4 [octet]. Epoch time of 2000 origin at the time of packet transmission (elapsed seconds since 00:00:00 UTC on January 1, 2000).

  • Aircraft code 4 [octet]. The source machine code. Allocate a unique number for each aircraft.

  • Datagram 240 [octet]]. Data body.

  • Error-detection code 4 [octet]. Error-detection code of the entire packet. CRC-32, which inspects the cyclic redundancy check, is used.

Packets containing errors and packets older than a predetermined threshold are discarded.

1.3 A.3  Network Layer

The network layer retransmits the received data. To minimize the load on the network layer, it manages the time to live (TTL) of the packet.

  • Datagram header 4 [octet]. Represents the nature of the datagram.

  • Destination aircraft code 4 [octet]. Destination machine code.

  • Source aircraft code 4 [octet]. Source machine code.

  • Transmission timecode 4 [octet]. Epoch time of 2000 origin at the time of datagram transmission. Unlike the time code of the datalink layer, this does not change even if the packet hops.

  • Payload 224 [octet]. Data body.

1.4 A.4  Transport Layer

The Reed–Solomon code, which is a more powerful error-correction function than the cyclic redundancy check, is implemented in the transport layer. If three datagrams are combined with the error-correction signal and distributed to four datagrams and transmitted, an average of 168 [octets] per datagram will be allocated to the implementer.

B  Simulation Program

The simulation program used in this report is posted in github.com/kanaya. This program operates with the Scheme interpreter (R5RS conforming or higher). The operation confirmation was performed with Gauche Scheme Shell version 0.9.4, OS X version 10.11.3 (Darwin version 15.3.0/x86_64).

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Kanaya, I., Itoh, E. (2017). An Ad-Hoc Mesh Network for Flight-Deck Interval Management of Airplanes. In: Peng, SL., Lee, GL., Klette, R., Hsu, CH. (eds) Internet of Vehicles. Technologies and Services for Smart Cities. IOV 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10689. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72329-7_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72329-7_15

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-72328-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-72329-7

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