A distributed communication system for an airport environment

Providing quality of service (QoS) to the passengers at an airport is extremely challenging due to the dynamic nature of the environment in which they operate coupled with 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. Moreover, deploying an ad hoc system in such a scenario is extremely challenging as we not only need to have a comprehensive knowledge of passengers´ flow, their behaviour and activities, we also need to know the exact locations of information points so the real representation of message dissemination in this environment can be realised. For this purpose, having previously developed the passenger flow model, some unknown parameters, in the ad hoc set up, such as the impact of transmission range with respect to passengers in range, packet dropping probability (PDP), average number of hops, delay and throughput must be studied to improve data dissemination. A physical propagation model has been incorporated into the system to provide a more realistic representation of the communication layer which enables an accurate evaluation of the performance of the system and results have been compared with the idealistic scenario.