A-GR: A novel geographical routing protocol for AANETs

With the rapid growth of general aircraft and lack of ground facilities, air traffic control and aeronautical communication system face huge pressure, especially in low-altitude airspace. Aeronautical ad hoc networks (AANETs) are large scale multi-hop wireless network of aircraft, which could provide direct air-to-air communication between aircraft without ground infrastructures. However, the features of aircraft node present a great challenge to provide efficient and reliable data packet delivery in AANETs. In this paper, we present an Automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) system aided geographic routing protocol (called A-GR) for AANETs. The proposed A-GR uses the position and velocity of aircraft provided by airborne ADS-B system to eliminate the traditional routing beaconing and presents a velocity-based metric for next hop selection, which could adaptively cope with the fast moving of aircraft and dynamic changes of network topology. Many simulations are performed and the results show that the proposed A-GR can effectively decrease the routing overhead, improve the packet delivery ratio and make good use of the network resources.