Optimization of robust header compression for aeronautical communication

The ceaselessly growing requests for communication capacity in the aeronautical sector will soon result in an excess of the current Air Traffic Control (ATC) capacity limitations. To cope with this issue, current research activities, such as the EU FP7 SANDRA project, investigate new seamless IPv6-based network solutions which integrate the different aeronautical services. These solutions will generate a significant protocol overhead due to all the required network functionalities. Within this paper, the focus is on the insertion of RObust Header Compression (ROHC) in the SANDRA architecture to reduce the protocol overheads. Performance evaluations for the usage of ROHC in the aeronautical context are provided and a strong emphasis of this work is put on a discussion on how ROHC parameters can be optimized for operational aeronautical communication.