Coalitional Dynamic Graph Game for Aeronautical Ad Hoc Network Formation

Aeronautical
ad hoc
networking (AANET) of the air vehicles is envisioned to support future enhanced applications, such as free flight and in-flight Internet, and AANET serves as the middle layer of the air–space–ground integrated network, bridging the space and the ground components. However, intermittent connectivity is the greatest challenge to an AANET. To deal with the intermittence, the air vehicle acts as a relay in an AANET using the buffer onboard to temporally cache the data when an interruption occurs, known as opportunistic transmission. For the highly dynamic topology of an AANET, we use a sampled dynamic graph to capture significant variations while ignoring trivial changes for avoiding extra complexity. And thus we formulate a coalitional game incorporating with the dynamic graph for the AANET to obtain the optimal transmission schedule in terms of the effective throughput with limited transmission delay. The corresponding coalitional dynamic graph game algorithm will then generate an approximately optimal AANET formation, which converges to Nash equilibrium within finite iterations. The simulations conducted with the real flight data show that 700 Mb of buffer size onboard and 1400 Mb of buffer in the Internet gateway station (IGS) are the optimal settings for the opportunistic transmission, and the coalitional dynamic graph game algorithm outperforms the geographic location-based greedy perimeter stateless routing algorithm in terms of the total received data amounts.