The air traffic management environment is evolving rapidly as the number of passengers is expected to double by 2034 and global security concerns are on the rise. In addition, drones are becoming pervasive and starting to mingle with manned flights in airspace – creating the critical need for even more surveillance, communication and control capabilities.
Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) must deal with these challenges and enhance their infrastructure interoperability with other ANSPs as well as industry stakeholders, whilst maintaining service, availability and reliability as they transition from legacy service platforms.
Air Traffic Management: Growing Complexity
Modern air traffic management uses several services and applications – such as Aeronautical Information Services (AIS) and Air Traffic Flow Management (ATFM) – which must be interoperable and harmonized so that aircrafts can operate at peak efficiency when moving from one airspace to another.
To be effective, all of these services require state-of-the-art ICT infrastructures that feature high performance, scalable computing capacity in a distributed data center environment. These must encompass interoperable data and communication exchange services as well as reliable, real-time transmission and communication networks – all with rigorous data security.
No Network, No Communication, No Flight
During the entire journey of an aircraft from one airport to another, it transmits and receives a huge amount of information critical for the safety of its passengers and crew. To support his process, ANSPs must operate mission-critical networking infrastructures that connect:
- All VHF and VDL stations
- Automatic dependent surveillance ground stations (ADS)
- Advanced surface movement guidance and control system ground stations (A-SMGCS)
- Differential global navigation satellite system (GNSS) ground stations
- Control towers
- Air traffic control centers
- Primary and secondary radars
- Weather stations
- Instrument landing systems (ILS)
An Increasingly Challenging Landscape
As malicious cyberattacks focus on exploiting vulnerabilities to steal information and disrupt or threaten the delivery of essential services on which millions of lives depend – security is an obvious top concern. Another essential challenge in today’s landscape is building and maintaining an always-on network to provide uninterrupted 24/7 connectivity and interoperability among ANSPs whilst maintaining quality.
At the same time, ANSPs under tightened budgets must reduce the cost of operations while scaling capacity to handle the projected large increase in air traffic. Underlining these challenges is the fact that existing air traffic communications infrastructure is largely still based on systems developed in the 1940s, which are becoming obsolete. However, air traffic to and from smaller regional airports increasingly is managed remotely from a central control tower serving multiple airports – a trend that’s having a strong impact on the supportive ICT infrastructure, as it requires that real-time multimedia communications, often with 360-degree HD video, be transmitted on low-latency networks.
Drones also present a real and rising threat for the safety of conventional air traffic. While the aviation industry and governments at all levels explore technical and regulatory solutions for controlling UAS traffic, the millions of drones expected to enter the skies over the next few years will put the scalability of the ATM networks and communication means under strong pressure, since their traffic volume can fluctuate with the calendar and the time of day.
To ensure safety and avoid collisions, it is imperative to manage and regulate drone traffic by a system that can monitor and adjust trajectory as well as notify about airspace constraints – which requires dynamic network bandwidth adjustment and elastic compute resources as drone traffic rises and ebbs.
As a result, at peak hours the communications network needs more bandwidth to carry and process flight information, with more computational capacity in data centers. The traditional static paradigm of dimensioning network and server capacity in the data centers to projected peak loading is not efficient or economic.
Overall, air traffic management is a global challenge, with some regional distinctions and concentrations of activity. For example, the United Kingdom’s National Air Traffic Services (NATS) already counts 30,000 flights daily across Europe – making it one of the busiest airspaces in the world, with more than 90,000 daily global flights. As a result, ANSPs in Europe are moving quickly to modernize their networks (see sidebar, Switzerland’s Skyguide modernizes communications network for air traffic control). This huge volume of flights and associate exchange of massive amounts of data demands the most advanced communications networks.
The solution: Multi-service IP Networks
Although the traditional model is to build a dedicated communications network for each critical application, this approach is inefficient and tends to discourage collaboration.
Many ANSPs are instead looking to deploy a converged communications network to support all applications. This model attains higher operation efficiency, creates collaboration synergy and improves network economics, while retaining the same high reliability and deterministic performance as before as well as the capacity to support future applications and services.
An IP/MPLS network meets all of these requirements, offering standards-based technology, resiliency, end-to-end quality of service (QoS) and strong security. It enables ANSPs to combine multiple mission-critical services and applications onto a single network – each with differentiated QoS, traffic segregation, high cybersecurity, multi-tenancy, fast recovery and low latency if necessary. It also maximizes cost efficiency, reliability and operational efficiency in addition to exceptional protection against cyberattack.
Additionally, an IP/MPLS network is ‘future-proof,’ ready for successive generations of new technologies, while continuing to support existing time division multiplexing (TDM) and legacy applications with a smooth migration path to IP.
Such a highly available IP/MPLS network is ideally suited to support both mission-critical air traffic management operations and administrative communications requirements, while simplifying operations management and guaranteeing quality of service (QoS) end-to-end.
Virtual private network (VPN) technology supported by IP/MPLS also enables a common network to carry data from many different applications, regardless of whether the VPNs in use are IP, Ethernet or basic TDM cross-connect.
Advanced QoS for Consistently High Application Performance
Since many applications are carried on the same IP/MPLS network, QoS is key to ensuring sufficient bandwidth resources. In order to allocate appropriate priority to each application to prevent performance compromise, operators have the opportunity to deploy a customized QoS policy at the network edge. This hierarchical QoS capability can provide further flexibility to each application in how it allots bandwidth resources to its different components (e.g. control, data and management).
Graceful TDM Migration for Minimal Operation Disruption
While legacy time division multiplexing (TDM) network equipment and services from carriers are being discontinued, many deployed applications such as radar, VHF and emergency communications are here to stay for years to come. Fortunately, IP/MPLS supports the graceful migration of legacy mission-critical applications onto the new converged, multi-service network.
This approach allows ANSPs to execute a full transition to the packet network while providing TDM service continuity – assuring that all services meet critical reliability and performance requirements.
Open Architecture for Deployment Flexibility
Air traffic control networks tend to also span very large geographical areas. For that reason, it’s imperative the network solution have an open architecture to extend IP/MPLS to all sites, near and far, with the flexibility to fully interact with each of them. This open architecture allows IP/MPLS to operate in the private network, atop a communication service provider’s VPN service, and even as a satellite link, affording ultimate network deployment flexibility.
Critical-grade Resiliency for Robust Survivability
Another factor to consider is network outages, which can cause severe disruptions to air traffic management and jeopardize passenger safety – resulting in substantial economic loss.
Since an IP/MPLS network is protected by a multi-layer network resiliency framework, when a network failure occurs it uses a best-fit approach to coordinate multiple recovery mechanism at all layers to achieve the best restoration performance. It also has the flexibility to utilize all available physical connectivity options to deliver traffic, even in the case of a multi-fault scenario.
With non-stop routing and signaling technology, an IP/MPLS network will continue to forward traffic with no application performance degradation, even when a router’s control hardware fails.
Impregnable Network Defense for Secure Operations
Like an airport that deploys perimeter fences to secure its borders, a secure network deploys perimeter security measures through dynamic packet filtering in firewalls. Likewise where CCTV and video analytics software is used to detect suspicious behavior, networks utilize intrusion detection systems (IDS) and intrusion prevention systems (IPS). A network’s unified threat management system (UTMS) is the equivalent of a centralized security control center.
Operators can also employ embedded IP/MPLS security features to build secure mission-critical networks. In a converged IP/MPLS network carrying multi-protocol data (packet and TDM), a traditional encryption solution such as IPSec is inadequate, since it doesn’t operate seamlessly at the MPLS layer – making network group encryption (NGE) a compelling alternative.
Elastic Scalability for Future Growth
Given the industry’s increased air traffic and security concerns, along with the consolidation of ground and approach control into regional locations with additional responsibility for distant medium and small airports, ANSPs must ensure that air traffic management networks are also scalable in capacity and coverage – improving operational cost without jeopardizing efficiency and safety. This is another area where IP/MPLS routers can benefit as they easily scale up network bandwidth and capacity to accommodate additional bandwidth requirements.
A Network Evolution Path for Future Air Traffic Management
Aviation is on the cusp of a new era. Beside the projected immense traffic growth in the next 20 years, the wide scope and large scale of drone applications will bring momentous changes to the landscape.
The industry must consider many factors in its future as aviation plays a consequential role in facilitating efficient movement of people and goods – making it foundational to travel and trade globally. With the projected enormous traffic growth and continued quest for better passenger safety, aviation is redefining itself by deploying and expanding its infrastructures, and adopting new technologies while remaining nimble and efficient in operations.
A new, converged network serves as bedrock to the infrastructure by providing secure and reliable communications to meet the requirements of today and the years to come.
Richard van Wijk is the practice lead of the Aviation program inside Nokia. With over 25 years of experience in Telecommunications business development & consultancy, Richard has been instrumental in many projects for a number of companies like Lucent, Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia: From contracting the first SDH/DWDM projects to contracting the first LTE Air to Ground Aviation project in Europe.
