13.09.2014 Views

Local Area Networks (LANs) in Aircraft - FTP Directory Listing - FAA

Local Area Networks (LANs) in Aircraft - FTP Directory Listing - FAA

Local Area Networks (LANs) in Aircraft - FTP Directory Listing - FAA

SHOW MORE
SHOW LESS

Create successful ePaper yourself

Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.

neighbor as a next hop after “HoldTime” seconds. 17 If the timer values are <strong>in</strong>creased to<br />

reduce the number of these time outs, then the responsiveness of the protocol is also<br />

reduced, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g the time <strong>in</strong>terval it takes for the remote peer to discover that the<br />

connection has been broken and, therefore, stop needlessly wast<strong>in</strong>g wireless bandwidth<br />

by send<strong>in</strong>g nondeliverable packets across that l<strong>in</strong>k.<br />

• BGP can only establish well-known, pairwise connections (i.e., it cannot support meshes)<br />

and lacks a peer discovery mechanism. Therefore, as ASs move <strong>in</strong> relationship with each<br />

other, the possibility exists that the communicat<strong>in</strong>g peers will move out of range of each<br />

other. If this happens, then the BGP connection is dropped, even if other routers with<strong>in</strong><br />

the peer AS are still with<strong>in</strong> transmission range of the aircraft. This connectivity<br />

brittleness is a primary difficulty of us<strong>in</strong>g BGP <strong>in</strong> mobile environments.<br />

• S<strong>in</strong>ce BGP does not have a peer discovery capability, the AS boundary routers (ASBR)<br />

that host BGP communications need to be configured to connect to other ASBRs with<strong>in</strong><br />

their (remote) peer ASs where connectivity is anticipated to be needed dur<strong>in</strong>g flight<br />

plann<strong>in</strong>g. Once such connectivity has been anticipated (i.e., the ASBRs for all ASs<br />

with<strong>in</strong> the flight plan need to be correctly configured to enable each pairwise<br />

connectivity relationship), these connections can either be turned on <strong>in</strong> advance or turned<br />

on via a coord<strong>in</strong>ated out-of-band mechanism dur<strong>in</strong>g flight. The later alternative runs the<br />

risk of undergo<strong>in</strong>g the loss of connectivity while the previous AS connections are torn<br />

down and the new AS connections established. If the aircraft is mov<strong>in</strong>g slowly enough,<br />

and the ground systems are positioned closely enough, it may be possible to accomplish<br />

this transaction while the aircraft is <strong>in</strong> range of both ground system locations, thereby<br />

avoid<strong>in</strong>g loss of communications. However, a key po<strong>in</strong>t to recognize is that active BGP<br />

connections (i.e., unless the BGP connections on both sides are turned off) cont<strong>in</strong>ue to<br />

attempt to connect with their peers even when they are physically out of range of each<br />

other, thereby needlessly wast<strong>in</strong>g wireless network capacity.<br />

The second and third issues can be theoretically mitigated by establish<strong>in</strong>g BGP relationships<br />

between ASs across satellite l<strong>in</strong>ks. As long as each BGP peer rema<strong>in</strong>s with<strong>in</strong> the satellite’s<br />

beam, the entity is not mov<strong>in</strong>g from the satellite’s perspective. S<strong>in</strong>ce satellite beams can be<br />

geographically quite large, this may be an attractive solution for airborne environments.<br />

However, the benefit is reduced if the aircraft or ground station is near the edge of a beam, if<br />

geographical movement exceeds the beam’s diameter <strong>in</strong> unforeseen ways, if the cumulative user<br />

capacity exceeds the cumulative satellite capacity of that geographic region, or if the satellite<br />

becomes unavailable. There is also the issue of mitigat<strong>in</strong>g adverse IP and TCP reactions to<br />

geo-stationary satellite latencies. For example, BGP itself runs over TCP transports. It is<br />

possible that other air-to-ground or air-to-air communications also run over TCP transports as<br />

well. Unfortunately, TCP treats latency as be<strong>in</strong>g network congestion. Thus, TCP<br />

<strong>in</strong>appropriately backs off its transmission rate for their sessions <strong>in</strong> response to geo-synchronous<br />

latency, reduc<strong>in</strong>g the efficiency of those l<strong>in</strong>ks, unless mitigation techniques have been <strong>in</strong>troduced<br />

<strong>in</strong>to the system to address this issue.<br />

17<br />

The RFC 1771-recommended BGP timer values are 120 seconds for ConnectRetry, 90 seconds for HoldTime,<br />

and 30 seconds for KeepAlive.<br />

65

Hooray! Your file is uploaded and ready to be published.

Saved successfully!

Ooh no, something went wrong!