SAPIENT: Enabling Real-Time Monitoring and Control in the Future Communication Infrastructure of Air Traffic Management

This paper describes the SAPIENT system, a real-time monitoring and control infrastructure for Air Traffic Management. Within the latter, aircrafts constantly measure the state and quality of their datalinks, and report these measurements to a ground entity, tagging them with a time/space reference. The ground entity, then, builds a map of the monitored portion of the sky, and can feed back information to the aircrafts themselves regarding conditions that they would not be able to measure otherwise. This allows optimal vertical handover decisions to be made, increasing service continuity and improving communication performance. We show that the SAPIENT system can be implemented using existing technologies, without the need for expensive hardware. Moreover, we show via simulation that a small, negligible increase in the communication overhead due to SAPIENT reporting brings about considerable benefits.