Exploiting aerial heterogeneous network for implementing wireless flight recorder

Flight recorder (or black box) equipped in a commercial aircraft plays a crucial role in investigating aviation accidents and incidents. While intended to be indestructible, the flight recorder can still be damaged in extreme conditions such as explosions, crashes, etc., or may become lost in the case of a crash in an inaccessible geographic location. In this paper, we propose a wireless flight recorder which can transmit the recorded operating data of a plane while in flight to a ground center through an aerial network with the aid of satellites. We utilize satellite links to provide widely available control channels and inter-aircraft wireless communications as a high-speed dynamic data plane in a software defined network framework, and carry out a network-wide global optimization for flight recorder data streaming in real time. By viewing the flight recorder data streaming task as a traffic engineering problem (in particular, as a multi-commodity flow problem), we aim at maximizing total streaming throughput and minimizing the usage of expensive and scarce satellite channels. We validate the feasibility and efficacy of proposed wireless flight recorder scheme by experimenting with a realistic setting for aerial heterogeneous networks and the real-time flights location information published by the International Air Transport Association (IATA).