AeroMTP: A fountain code-based multipath transport protocol for airborne networks

Airborne networks (ANs) are special types of ad hoc networks that can be used to enhance situational awareness, flight coordination and flight efficiency in civil and military aviation. Compared to ground networks, ANs have some unique attributes including high node mobility, frequent topology changes, mechanical and aerodynamic constrains, strict safety requirements and harsh communication environment. Thus, the performance of conventional transmission control protocol (TCP) will be dramatically degraded in ANs. Aircraft commonly have two or more heterogeneous network interfaces which offer an opportunity to form multiple communication paths between any two nodes in ANs. To satisfy the communication requirements in ANs, we propose aeronautical multipath transport protocol (AeroMTP) for ANs, which effectively utilizes the available bandwidth and diversity provided by heterogeneous wireless paths. AeroMTP uses fountain codes as forward error correction (FEC) codes to recover from data loss and deploys a TCP-friendly rate-based congestion control mechanism for each path. Moreover, we design a packet allocation algorithm based on optimization to minimize the delivery time of blocks. The performance of AeroMTP is evaluated through OMNeT++ simulations under a variety of test scenarios. Simulations demonstrate that AeroMTP is of great potential to be applied to ANs.