Airborne Internet Web Services Technology

The Airborne Internet is an information network between aircraft and the ground that enables information exchange experienced with today's internet. This capability will automate the way in which air traffic control monitors and tracks aircraft, significantly improving airspace management and response times, and how aircraft collaborate and share information to significantly improve situational awareness and surveillance. Commercially Developed Web Services is the technology enabler to provide the CIE discovery-on-demand capability. However, caution must be taken on how these Web Services are designed and deployed because the underlying protocols have been developed for land communication channels, which typically provide orders-of-magnitude more bandwith than air communication channels. Additionally, just using Web Services and XML doesn't solve the interoprability issues, how these technologies are used is crucial to success. We offer our experience of applying Web services to aviation applications with the DOD Air Force and Navy services. This on-going work has shown the need to go beyond just defining Web Service and supporting XML Scheman and Namespace syntax. We have developed a Quality-of-Delivery framework to support Web Services across low bandwidth networks, and an interoperable and scalable information model using W3C emerging technologies.