GRU-Aided Intra-Cluster Topology Mapping for Aeronautical Ad-Hoc Networks

Aeronautical Ad-hoc Networks (AANET) is a fairly new concept that connects airplanes via wireless air-to-air links, allowing passengers to access the Internet during a flight. The unstable air-to-air link characteristics and ultra-dynamic topology become the main differences between AANETs and usual ad-hoc architectures. To handle these differences, the AANET topology could be created in the form of clusters by collecting airplanes having similar features under the same set. However, it is also difficult to sustain the cluster topologies since ultra-dynamic characteristics still affect them. Therefore, the current cluster topology must be continuously mapped to the airplanes to notify them as a part of sustainability. If we do not ensure the sustainability of the clusters, the packet transfer success of AANET is decreased with higher end-to-end latency. At that point, to solve this aircraft notification problem and map the current cluster topology to them at each timestamp, in this paper, we propose a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU)-based topology mapping mechanism for AANETs. Here, the GRU can continuously notify the airplanes at each timestamp about topology changes. Therefore, airplanes can forget the old topology when it changes. Otherwise, the topology taken from the previous timestamp is continuously remembered if it does not change. Finally, the performance evaluations reveal that the GRU-aided topology mapping can achieve roughly 42% higher packet delivery ratio with 34% reduced end-to-end latency.