Performance Evaluation of Network Mobility Handover over Future Aeronautical Data Link

The aviation community is currently working on the standardization of data communication systems for the future air traffic management. In this context, the ICAO and EUROCONTROL are working on the standardization of IP-based aeronautical telecommunications network and future radio access technologies, respectively. With this work, for the first time, we integrate L-DACS 1, which is one candidate for future radio access technologies, with realistic IP-based network layer functionality and analyze the handover delay performance. We first investigate the effect of link layer retransmissions on handover delay performance. We realized that for regions with low signal-to-noise ratio (BER of 1e-3), link layer retransmissions improve the total handover delay (layer 2 and 3) by about 80%. Considering regions with high signal-to-noise ratio (BER of 1e-5), the benefit of link layer retransmissions becomes negligible due to the reduced number of packet losses. During our analysis, we notice frequent transmission of router advertisement messages causing significant overhead on L-DACS 1 and propose two approaches in order to decrease the overhead to an acceptable range. In the last section, we tackle the increase in handover delay due to a limited number of return link resource request opportunities in congested cells.