Resilient communication network of Air Traffic Management system

Air Traffic Management (ATM) systems represent essential infrastructure that is critical for flight safety. Communication is a key element in the present ATM system. Communication between air traffic controllers and pilots remains a vital part of air traffic control operations, and communication problems can result in hazardous situations. The modern ATM system has independent direct communication channels (CC) for each controllers operating at different radio frequencies. Currently, the main method of improving the reliability of controller's CC is redundancy of equipment to provide communications on each frequency of interaction ground-to-air channel. The fault tolerance of such method is limited by number of redundancy elements. ATM communication network has periodical sessions of communications with relatively short active periods of communication interactions alternate with relatively long pauses in the translation of signals. The resilience of such network can be improved by dynamic distribution of communication equipment for operation in different channels during communication sessions. In paper the reliability of resilient Air Traffic Management voice communication network with periodical sessions of communications for real conditions of ATM and with a common set of radio stations without their division into the main and backup elements is investigated. Mathematical model of the channel reliability is developed. Comparative analysis of reliability for proposed network architecture and traditional redundant structure of communication network is performed.