Quality of service (QoS) sensitivity for the OSPF protocol in the airborne networking environment

In this paper we examine the use of the open shortest path first (OSPF) protocol for use within the future airborne network. OSPF is one of the standards-based routing protocols that could be used within the airborne network. However, given the fading characteristics of airborne line-of-sight (LOS) channels, OSPF may not be as effective as it is in the commercial terrestrial Internet. Therefore, some modification of OSPF timer settings, most notably the "Hello" protocol timers, may be necessary to enable OSPF to be useful for airborne networking. Our experiments, which examined the effects of OSPF settings in an airborne network environment, demonstrate that configuring the settings to provide faster convergence can reduce the traffic loss by up to 80%. Average packet latency and average packet jitter were not significantly affected by the changes to the OSPF timers. It will be important for the airborne network to consider connectivity interruptions when configuring a routing protocol to limit data losses