A novel multi-objective approach for link selection in aeronautical telecommunication networks

The International Civil Aviation Organization has recently established new standards for the aeronautical telecommunication network using Internet protocol suite (ATN/IPS). As ATN services may operate on shared data communication links, optimizing the use of the shared resources has become fundamental to ensure that applications operate adequately. In this context, load balancing for ATN/IPS can be considered in an attempt to optimize the use of links based on their capacities. The literature is scarce of network management studies in which load balancing is taken into account. In this paper, we propose an integrated model for managing ATN/IPS links. In addition to objective parameters, we define subjective parameters of the model through the voluntary participation of air traffic controllers. The well-known multi-criteria decision making method Analytic Hierarchy Process was employed to define the subjective parameters of the integrated model, which met the requirements of communication services and applications of the aeronautical network. The network selection problem was then modeled in a multi-objective optimization problem after combining the criteria by using Simple Additive Weighting method. Computational experiments with real data from Brazilian ATN (ATN-Br) were performed. The $$\varepsilon $$ ε -constraint method was applied to solve the multi-objective problem by varying the balance levels of the network. The results of the experiments show that the proposed integrated model maintains links with a usage rate closer to the trade-off point. In addition, the use of objective and subjective criteria allows the model to effectively prioritize critical communications in link degraded scenarios, which does not happen in the baseline model, in which priorities are pre-defined.