IP Mobility in Aeronautical Communications

Abstract : In the sake of modernization, aviation stakeholders decided that the future aviation network infrastructure, in particular for air-ground communication systems, will move towards IP based networks. It has been referred to in the International Civil Aviation Organization as Aeronautical Telecommunication Network/Internet Protocol Suite. Due to the heterogeneous communication environment , it is necessary to support handover between different access technologies and access networks. In this article, we first define the very specific aeronautical communication environment. Our main contribution is a performance assessment of the most deployed network protocols capable of managing IP mobility within the aeronautical environment. We focus our analysis on the Mobile IPv6 protocol and implementation issues of a representative aeronautical network in Omnet++.