A mobility management mechanism in aeronautical telecommunication network

Aeronautical Telecommunication Network (ATN) is adopting IPv6 as the network protocol. One of the crucial problems during the adoption is the mobility of the sub-network which is complicated by the numerous IP nodes inside the airplane. The airplane has a worldwide mobility and the bandwidth of aviation data link is very limited, therefore it will bring great network overhead and handover delay when the airplane is communicating far away its home without a proper mobility management mechanism. A new mobility management mechanism for aviation mobile network is proposed in this paper. This mechanism employs Network Mobility (NEMO) to solve the mobility of sub-network inside an airplane and the NEMO route is optimized with a hierarchical strategy. Furthermore, a fast handover method is introduced into the proposed mechanism. The mechanism is discussed in detail and compared with the basic NEMO solution. The simulation results illustrate that the proposed mechanism achieves a better performance in route optimization and handover latency.