Combined Optimal Topology Formation and Rate Allocation for Aircraft to Aircraft Communications

Providing broadband in-flight Internet connectivity to aircraft is challenging. Today's options include satellite communications (SC) and direct air-to-ground communication (DA2GC). To overcome data rate, delay and cost limitations of SC and coverage limitations of DA2GC, one can extend DA2GC with air-to-air communication (A2AC) by enabling multi-hop communication. To investigate the A2AC performance, we construct a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) problem of DA2GC and A2AC, jointly considering interference in topology formation and flow assignment. Our objective is to maximize the number of aircraft that can be connected with a given specific minimum data rate threshold. The evaluation is performed for low aircraft density scenarios over the North Atlantic. We show that in the investigated scenarios, over 90 % of aircraft can have at least 50 Mbps, some being up to 1600 kilometers away from the closest base station (BS). Furthermore, we identify antenna capabilities as an important factor for A2AC performance.