Research Challenges in Airborne Ad-hoc Networks (AANETs)

Wireless Ad-hoc Networks have been one of the major research issues from last one and half decade. However, the primary researches have focused on ground vehicles and random mobility scenarios. But due to recent advancements in communication technologies and signal processing techniques, nowadays, we have a new and special kind of kind of ad-hoc networks called “Airborne Ad-hoc Networks (AANETs)” in which aircrafts are implemented as nodes traveling with significant speeds. Because of unique characteristics like higher mobility, highly dynamic aeronautical environment and time-varying inter-aircraft radio link quality, there are new research challenges in AANETs. These networks can be used for enhancing the situational awareness, flight efficiency, and flight coordination in military and civilian applications. In this paper, we have presented the theoretical review of research challenges in AANETs which have been found after study of previous research papers. It has been found that current routing protocols and 2-D mobility models which are being used for typical Ad-hoc networks are not able to cope with AANETs environment. There is a requirement to implement the physical movement of aircrafts in more realistic manner. For this, AANETs need domain-specific routing protocols, geographical protocols, and hierarchical protocols along with memory-based three-dimensional mobility models to deal with the challenges of highly dynamic aeronautical environment.