Advanced communications networking concepts for the National Airspace System

This paper presents terminal-area and en-route communications networking concepts that aim to help meet future aviation requirements. Future aviation applications, combined with increasing air traffic density and aging and antiquated systems, will significantly change the National Airspace System (NAS) and result in a need to develop and adopt new communications technologies. An architectural study for flight information services (FIS) performed by The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL), which considered both near-term and long-term technologies including terrestrial line-of-sight (LOS) systems, satellite communications (SATCOM) beyond LOS (BLOS) systems, and hybrid architectures which seek to use both types of systems, revealed that there are no existing or envisioned communications solutions that are well-suited for the application in all cases. Furthermore, studies of the terminal area reveal that there is a lack of near-term technologies that can address all requirements. This paper presents a vision of an Internet-like NAS networking architecture, and then presents mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) and wireless local area network (WLAN) concepts that could provide significantly improved networking both in the en-route and terminal areas