Management of dynamic airborne network using cloud computing

Nowadays airborne network is becoming more and more complex. Traditional centralized or weakly distributed network managing solution could not quite fit the complex network for the lack of bandwidth efficiency. Recently, strongly distributed and cooperative network managements have emerged, which could achieve a better performance. However, they have a much higher requirement on managers, and it is difficult to ensure the availability of the management. Cloud computing, as a new technology, ensures high scalability and availability of the infrastructure. The concept of airborne cloud is proposed in this paper on the basis of cloud computing architecture, and its hierarchical architecture is described. Systemic integration layer turns users' requests into missions, which are divided into function sets. Every function set is implemented by several service elements provided by systemic function layer. Service elements use hardware resources in the infrastructure layer. In airborne cloud, resources are gathered together, thus missions could be processed more efficiency without improving every node's performance. Airborne cloud is then used to manage the airborne network, and some practical examples are given. Since hardware resources are still limited, the airborne cloud is extended to connect with the commercial cloud. In this case, the network management would be more flexible and easier to update.