• ldacs
• satcom
• distributed systems
• multilink
• fci
• atn
• avionics

In aeronautical field, Air Traffic Management (ATM) communications are critical for the safety of life. Indeed, they concern operations such as collision avoidance, in-flight assistance, aircrafts’ manoeuvres, etc. Supporting reliable communications for ATM is essential, however, the increasing number of the traffic volume generated by both manned and unmanned aircrafts flying simultaneously is leading to network congestion.
The Future Communication Infrastructure (FCI) is expected to solve the aforementioned problem using multiple data link (DL) technologies (e.g. SATCOM, LDACS, …) simultaneously, (i.e. multilink). However, aircrafts are not yet able to dynamically and automatically choose the best DL, thus possibly experiencing service discontinuities and unavailability.
The main objective of this thesis is to study a system architecture that can monitor the environment, exchange this information and assist aircrafts during the selection of the best DL based on those measurements.
The analysis starts with the identification of processes and basic functionalities that are essential for making a multilink decision. It continues into designing a distributed and cooperative software architecture, based on service-orientation design principles, whose basic functionalities are configurable. Afterwards, an early implementation of the architecture is developed through the Omnet++ simulation framework. Finally, to verify the architecture, the thesis ends up with functional tests.