L-DACS Mobility Management in ATN/IPS Network: Design, Prototyping, and Evaluation

L-band Digital Aeronautical Communications System (L-DACS) serves as the predominant air-to-ground communication link within the Future Communications Infrastructure (FCI) and supports the IPv6 network protocol. During the flight, L-DACS plays a crucial role in providing data communication services to aircraft. Due to the aircraft's mobility, handovers occur between different L-DACS cells, leading to network instability and posing a great risk to aviation safety. To alleviate this issue, the proposal of aircraft global mobility management aims to keep the aircraft's airborne global IP address unchanged when switching between network access points. This can be achieved through both intra-domain mobility management and inter-domain mobility management. To achieve intra-domain mobility management for L-DACS, we have designed a solution that integrates the L-DACS protocol stack with proxy mobile IPv6 (MIPv6). The integration ensures continuous connectivity of the airborne network during L-DACS cell handovers. L-DACS mobility handover test work is performed based on physical devices to verify the effectiveness of the proposed solution.