• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.9 no.7
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• pp.2548-2567
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• 2015

Recently, there has been a clear trend towards the application of ad hoc networking technology in civil aviation communication systems, giving birth to a new research field, namely, aeronautical ad hoc networks (AANETs). An AANET is a special type of ad hoc wireless network with a significantly larger scale and distinct characteristics of its mobile nodes. Thus, there is an urgent need to develop a simulator to facilitate the research in these networks. In this paper, we present a network simulator, Aero-Sim, for AANETs. Aero-Sim, which is based on the freely distributed NS-2 simulator, enables detailed packet-level simulations of protocols at the MAC, link, network, transport, and application layers by composing simulations with existing modules and protocols in NS-2. Moreover, Aero-Sim supports three-dimensional network deployment. Through several case studies using realistic China domestic air traffic, we show that the proposed simulator can be used to simulate AANETs and can reproduce the real world with high fidelity.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.8 no.10
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• pp.3439-3457
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• 2014

Clustering is an effective method for improving the performance of large scale mobile ad hoc networks. However, when the moving speed is very fast, the topology changes quickly, which leads to frequent cluster topology updates. The drastically increasing control overheads severely threaten the throughput of the network. SCBCS (Signal Characteristic Based Cluster Scheme) is proposed as a method to potentially reduce the control overheads caused by cluster formation and maintenance in aeronautical ad hoc networks. Each node periodically broadcasts Hello packets. The Hello packets can be replaced by data packets, which preserve bandwidth. The characteristics of the received packets, such as the Doppler shift and the power of two successive Hello packets, help to calculate the relative speed and direction of motion. Then, the link connection lifetime is estimated by the relative speed and direction of motion. In the clustering formation procedure, the node with the longest estimated link connection time to its one-hop neighbors is chosen as the cluster head. In the cluster maintenance procedure, re-affiliation and re-clustering schemes are designed to keep the clusters more stable. The re-clustering phenomenon is reduced by limiting the ripple effect. Simulations have shown that SCBCS prolongs the link connection lifetime and the cluster lifetime, which can reduce the topology update overheads in highly dynamic aeronautical ad hoc networks.

• Journal of Communications and Networks
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.58-66
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• 2015

Aeronautical communication networks (ACN) is an emerging concept in which aeronautical stations (AS) are considered as a part of multi-tier network for the future wireless communication system. An AS could be a commercial plane, helicopter, or any other low orbit station, i.e., Unmanned air vehicle, high altitude platform. The goal of ACN is to provide high throughput and cost effective communication network for aeronautical applications (i.e., Air traffic control (ATC), air traffic management (ATM) communications, and commercial in-flight Internet activities), and terrestrial networks by using aeronautical platforms as a backbone. In this paper, we investigate the issues about connectivity, throughput, and delay in ACN. First, topology of ACN is presented as a simple mobile ad hoc network and connectivity analysis is provided. Then, by using information obtained from connectivity analysis, we investigate two communication models, i.e., single-hop and two-hop, in which each source AS is communicating with its destination AS with or without the help of intermediate relay AS, respectively. In our throughput analysis, we use the method of finding the maximum number of concurrent successful transmissions to derive ACN throughput upper bounds for the two communication models. We conclude that the two-hop model achieves greater throughput scaling than the single-hop model for ACN and multi-hop models cannot achieve better throughput scaling than two-hop model. Furthermore, since delay issue is more salient in two-hop communication, we characterize the delay performance and derive the closed-form average end-to-end delay for the two-hop model. Finally, computer simulations are performed and it is shown that ACN is robust in terms of throughput and delay performances.