IPv6 Test Bed for Testing Aeronautical Applications

Aviation industries in United States and in Europe are undergoing a major paradigm shift in the introduction of new network technologies. In the US, NASA is also actively investigating the feasibility of IPv6 based networks for the aviation needs of the United States. In Europe, the Eurocontrol lead, Internet Protocol for Aviation Exchange (iPAX) Working Group is actively investigating the various ways of migrating the aviation authorities backbone infrastructure from X.25 based networks to an IPv6 based network. For the last 15 years, the global aviation community has pursued the development and implementation of an industry-specific set of communications standards known as the Aeronautical Telecommunications Network (ATN). These standards are now beginning to affect the emerging military Global Air Traffic Management (GATM) community as well as the commercial air transport community. Efforts are continuing to gain a full understanding of the differences and similarities between ATN and Internet architectures as related to Communications, Navigation, and Surveillance (CNS) infrastructure choices. This research paper describes the implementation of the IPv6 test bed at NASA GRC, and Computer Networks & Software, Inc. and these two test beds are interface to Eurocontrol over the IPv4 Internet. This research work looks into the possibility of providing QoS performance for Aviation application in an IPv6 network as is provided in an ATN based network. The test bed consists of three autonomous systems. The autonomous system represents CNS domain, NASA domain and a EUROCONTROL domain. The primary mode of connection between CNS IPv6 testbed and NASA and EUROCONTROL IPv6 testbed is initially a set of IPv6 over IPv4 tunnels. The aviation application under test (CPDLC) consists of two processes running on different IPv6 enabled machines