GTA-m: greedy trajectory-aware (m copies) routing for airborne networks

Airborne networks have potential applications in both civilian and military domains -- such as passenger in-flight Internet connectivity, air traffic control and in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) activities. However, airborne networks suffer from frequent disruptions due to high node mobility, ad hoc connectivity and line-of-sight blockages. These challenges can be alleviated through the use of disruption-tolerant networking (DTN) techniques. In this paper, we propose GTA-m, a multi-copy greedy trajectory-aware routing protocol for airborne networks. GTA-m employs DTN capabilities and exploits the use of flight information to forwarded bundles \emph{greedily} to intended destination(s). To alleviate the local minima issues that are inherent in greedy algorithms, GTA-m allows $m \geq 1$ copies of each bundle to be replicated throughout the entire network. We study the performance of GTA-m by simulating flights with varying numbers of aircraft and ground stations. Through simulations in OPNET, we show that GTA-m improves the average bundle delay by 34\% and 52\% as compared to conventional DTN routing protocols such as Spray-and-Wait and Epidemic respectively.