The capacity of aeronautical ad-hoc networks

Currently aeronautical communications are extremely limited by the Aeronautical Telecommunications Network standard, which does not support the inter-aircraft communications directly. To this end, we consider an aeronautical ad-hoc network based on a single flight path, whereby the aircrafts in the cruise stage can communicate with each other through multi-hop relays without the aid of ground stations. Due to the special topology of this network model, existing results based on the conventional mobile ad-hoc networks are not applicable for determining its capacity scaling law. In this paper, we prove the upper bound on the per-node capacity and construct a simple transmission scheduling scheme to achieve the lower bound.