SSGAR: A Genetic-based Routing Solution for Aeronautical Networks aided by Software Defined Satellite Network

Abstract

In the next generation network, both the satellite network layer and aeronautical network layer will play significant roles, leading the world into the era of global interconnectivity. However, the large-scale and high-mobility characteristics of aircraft networks greatly challenge the application of traditional routing algorithms. Therefore, this paper aims to solve this challenge by exploiting a Software Defined Satellite Network (Sat-SDN) to facilitate the routing in aeronautical networks. By centrally controlling aeronautical routing through satellites, the computation and communication overhead for aeronautical networks are relieved, since frequent packet flooding and broadcasting for synchronizing the rapidly-fluctuating topology of aeronautical networks can be avoided. To extend the aeronautical networking and transmission mechanism to a global scale, a multi-domain extension mechanism is proposed, while the concept of dynamic inter-domain telescope nodes is induced to greatly simplify the network topology. A Sat-SDN aided Genetic-based Aeronautical Routing (SSGAR) algorithm is further designed to solve the problem of huge routing calculation space and long convergence time in large-scale multi-node network scenarios. Moreover, experiments and simulations are conducted using real aircraft data, which demonstrate that our proposed SSGAR algorithm can effectively reduce communication costs and improve transmission quality compared to existing solutions.