Centeralised and distributed communication in an airport environment

Providing quality of service (QoS) to the passengers is extremely challenging due to the dynamic nature of the environment in which they operate and their own behaviour. With the regular arrivals and departures of flights, passenger flow tends to continuously change making it more difficult to maintain the required QoS. For this purpose, there is a need to study a complete architecture based on both centralised and ad hoc setups with the aim of improving data dissemination and increasing network reliability. Having previously developed the passenger flow model [1], in this paper we implement both a centralised and an ad hoc message exchange setups in the airport environment. To simulate the centralised scenario, we model the teletraffic based on passenger flow and the number of users and their applications in each cell while considering both spatial and temporal traffic variations. Having base stations responsible for access to the channel, we evaluate the performance of the airport model by using our proposed modified packet reservation multiple access (M-PRMA) protocol. In an ad hoc setup, some unknown parameters such as packets delay and the impact of transmission range with respect to nodes in range, number of hops and meeting time between nodes must be studied to improve data dissemination.