Effectiveness of Redundancy in Communication Network of Air Traffic Management System

Air Traffic Management (ATM) systems represent essential infrastructure that is critical for flight safety. Communication is a key element in the present ATM system. Communication between air traffic controllers and pilots remains a vital part of air traffic control operations, and communication problems can result in hazardous situations. The modern ATM system has independent direct communication channels (CC) for each controllers operating at different radio frequencies. Currently, the main method of improving the reliability of controller’s CC is duplication of equipment to provide communications on each frequency of interaction ground-to-air channel. Unfortunately the economic efficiency of used fault-tolerance approach is low. In the paper the reliability of selected communication channels with common set of standby radio station in the system with periodical sessions of communications for real conditions of ATM is discussed. Mathematical model of the channel reliability is developed. Comparative analysis of redundancy effectiveness for developed and used structure of communication network is performed.