Mobile-Agent Based Delay-Tolerant Network Architecture for Non-critical Aeronautical Data Communications

The future air transportation systems being developed under the NextGen (USA) and SESAR (European Commission) research initiatives will imply new levels of connectivity requirements between the concerned parties. Within this new aeronautical connectivity scenario, this paper proposes a new communication architecture for non-critical delay-tolerant communication (e.g. passenger data communications such as email and news services and non-critical telemetry data) based on mobile agents.Mobile agents carry both the user data and the routing algorithm used to decide the next hop in the path to the final destination. Therefore, mobile agents allow to increase the dynamism of the routing process. The proposed architecture constitutes an evolution of DTN (Delay Tolerant Networks), more flexible than the traditional layer-based approaches such as the Bundle Protocol and Licklider Transmission Protocol (LTP). This paper also presents the results obtained after network emulation and field experimentation of our proposed architecture.