An Airport Surface Wireless Network - Development & Pre-Deployment Experience

The next generation air transportation systems (NGATS) test bed will be used to demonstrate, validate and experiment with transformational air traffic management (ATM) technologies and concepts. This is a cooperative effort between Sensis Corporation and NASA Glenn Research Center. The testbed will be deployed at NASA Glenn and the Cleveland Hopkins, Burke Lakefront, and Lorraine County airports. An airport surface wireless network is part of the core infrastructure for the testbed. The objectives for the wireless network are to gain experience with wireless infrastructure in an airport surface environment. Challenges include identifying and utilizing node sites that provide sufficient coverage, and overcome link obstacles ranging from buildings to moving aircraft. This is also an opportunity to explore many multifaceted tradeoffs including spectrum allocation, channel structure, network capacity, application diversity and system cost. Commercial off the shelf (COTS) products will be used to implement the wireless networks. System deployment will include physical installation, network configuration and integration with a multilateration surface surveillance system. Initial network performance will be evaluated with both real and simulated traffic. Key performance parameters include network capacity, latency, packet loss, and link error performance. Mesh network link failover time is also critical. This paper describes the testbed network implementation and experience during the initial development and early integration in preparation for network deployment. NOTE: There are many acronyms used in this paper, see the appendix for definitions