Performance evaluation of network mobility handover over future aeronautical data link

The aviation community is currently working on the standardization of data communication systems for the future air traffic management. In this context, International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) has initiated a work on standardization of an IPv6-based aeronautical telecommunications network and on future radio access technologies, respectively. In this paper, we integrate L-Band Digital Aeronautical Communications System Option 1 (L-DACS 1), which is one candidate for future radio access technologies, with realistic IPv6-based network layer functionality and analyze the effect of handover delay to the TCP performance. Realistic Frame Error Rate (FER) values obtained from an L-DACS 1 physical layer simulator, which uses a realistic aeronautical channel model, are used in the simulation experiments. In the first stage, we decreased layer 3 handover latency by removing the Duplicate Address Detection (DAD) procedure for address configuration. In the second stage, we introduced a Home Agent (HA)-buffering method, which is used to buffer the traffic (destined to the mobile node) during handover. Transmission completion time is the primary performance metric in our analysis. With the HA-buffering method, the transmission completion time is reduced by at least 10% for the transmission of 110 kB of information over a wireless link with 31.5 kbit s −1 data rate.