Mobility Aware Routing and Mission Planning for the Airborne Network

Airborne network will form an integral and inseparable part of the global information grid. The link characteristics of the airborne network are very different from those of fixed internet and the terrestrial mobile ad-hoc wireless networks, which make the routing problem for airborne network a unique and challenging one. The nodes of the airborne network are highly sophisticated airborne platforms with precise control and have the capability to compute optimal flight plans in advance. During our phase I we have fully developed mobility dissemination/mobility aware routing protocol suite (in QualNet) which leverages the advantages offered by the computational and sensing equipment on board airborne platforms. We have compared the MARP/MDP protocol suite against OLSR and AODV in terms of throughput, packet delivery ratio, latency and control overhead. Our results are very encouraging. We have developed a mission planning toolbox whereby we use convex optimization tools to maximize ground coverage of airborne nodes under connectivity constraints. We have submitted our work on mission planning to the IEEE Aerospace Conference, 2008. Our phase II effort will focus on testing MARP/MDP protocol suite in an experimental network setting, adding features to MARP/MDP and developing a prototype airborne network mission planning toolbox.