Air Data Systems – Integrated Multi System Wireless Networks

Abstract

Aircraft data networks are fast becoming more of a necessity due to their support for user mobility. Many aircraft manufacturers are planning to deploy data networks within their airplanes and provide internet connectivity to their passengers. While a data network within the aircraft and passenger access to it causes some security concerns, it open up some safety enhancement opportunities. With internet connectivity within the airplane, the activity within the airplane can be monitored in real-time from the ground station. Also, using the high bandwidth satellite links, the flight critical data could be downloaded to a server in the ground station in real-time flight or periodically, thereby enabling real-time flight status monitoring. In a multi-system environment where a mobile node can utilize multiple interfaces and simultaneously connect to multiple providers, new opportunities exist for efficient location management strategies spanning heterogeneous cellular wireless networks. An integrated framework is developed for location management in such a multi-system, fourth generation (4G) wireless networks. This information-theoretic framework allows each individual sub-system to operate fairly independently, and does not require the knowledge of individual sub-network topologies. An efficient location management in such a loosely coupled network is designed by having a mobile node view its movement as a vector-valued sequence, and then transmit this sequence in an entropy coded form to the network. Ill. 2, bibl. 8 (in English; summaries in English, Russian and Lithuanian).