Aviation Applications for Next Generation Internet
U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory Contract

 
 

Prinpciple Investigators:
 

  • Dr. George L. Donohue, George Mason University
  • Dr. Jana Kosecka, George Mason University


    • Students:
     

  • Jennifer Lamont, Department  of SEOR, George Mason University
  • Phanidhar Narra, Department of Computer Science, George Mason University

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    The focus of this project is to evaluate the Aeronautical Telecommunications Network as a potential user of future high bandwidth internet.

    We are characterizing the communications requirements of the current commercial (hub and spoke) and general aviation (direct) air transportation system. The second goal is to develop a model of the future small aircraft transportation system that will allow us to estimate the communications loads that such a system would generate. Although we are currently modeling this system in our GMU transportation/communications laboratory, we are in close communication with the Logistics Management Institute, Inc. which is developing a much more detailed model, using a gravity model approach, that will include detailed ATC sector loading estimates. Future research may want to use the more detailed LMI model once it is developed and tested.
    Currently, there are approximately 5,200 +/- 400 aircraft in the air under FAA positive air traffic control. Of these, approximately 1,200 +/- 300 are privately owned general aviation aircraft. The commercial passenger and cargo aircraft largely follow a hub and spoke pattern with approximately 60 major airports in the US acting as hubs. Analysis of he FAA ETMS data indicate that the general aviation aircraft do not exhibit any discernable origin-destination pair patterns but the flight distance distributions can be characterized as a Weibull distribution with a mean of about 270 nmi. (for piston aircraft) and 700 nmi. (for jet aircraft) with a variance to mean ratio of 0.85. Furthermore, we have broken this flight activity down to total annual activity in the 20 FAA sectors for overall geographic distributions. It is also observed that there are about an order of magnitude more GA aircraft operations under non-FAA positive control (VFR).

     

    The probability that a flight will occur of a given duration is a function of the local airport population density and income distribution (as represented in a gravity model), time of year, day of week, time of day (periodic, deterministic functions) and a random destination with a distance form origin represented by a Weibull distribution. The amount of traffic will be estimated parametrically for a range of traffic growth rates.
     

    The traffic analysis is being developed concurrently with the communications requirements, including definition of different message categories.These include Flight Information Services (FIS), Traffic Information Services (TIS), Controller-Pilot Data-Link (CPDLC), Decision Support Data-Link (DSSDL) and Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B). Initial load analysis will be carried out for N. California and S. California FAA center airspace. This geographic region was chosen because of the compact nature of flight patterns between San Diego and the San Francisco Bay area. The message load analysis will consist of message size and frequency in order to estimate the full communication system requirements.

      Presentations and Reports
     

    1) Presentation to DARPA/ITO High Confidence Systems Workshop (21 June, 2000).
    2) Reviewed NASA results on advanced communications requirements for future aviation systems .
    3) Began development of simulation of SATS traffic to estimate communications bandwidth requirements.
    4) Analyzing FAA ETMS data to generate a statistical characterization of General Aviation Traffic patterns to be used by communications simulation model.
     
    [1] NASA AATT Task Order 24 Final Report,  Communications System Architecture Development for Air Traffic Management & Aviation Weather Information Dissemination , May 2000.