Development of simulator for aircraft ad hoc networks

Aircraft ad hoc networks, AANET for short, have attracted many researchers' interest as a new way for communications between aircrafts without existing infrastructure such as ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast). Thus, similar to previous works in other ad hoc networks, many research challenges such as routing protocol, medium access control, and transport layer still remain unsolved in this new research area. Among these issues, development of simulator is naturally necessary to conduct research in this area. Through the new simulator, we can evaluate and validate of the proposed protocol and network architecture for AANET. Despite of importance on this work, since current simulators used to support other ad hoc networks, do not include the key components for AANET yet. In this paper, we proposed development issues on the architecture for new simulator based on Qualnet. A new simulator will be developed in order to deal with mobility, propagation model, and other functions such as three dimensional visualization and external interface for other software properly. In addition, configurations for each new function described as well as example interfaces to user are described and illustrated.