Geographic load share routing in the airborne internet

Inflight internet access during oceanic flight is nowadays realized via satellite communication systems, which are costly and suffer from long propagation delays. Airborne mesh networking has been proposed as a cheaper and faster alternative to provide onboard connectivity, by enabling aircraft themselves to act as network routers, giving rise to a mutihop air-to-ground network in the sky. This vision, known as the Airborne Internet, forms the framework for this thesis. A major challenge in such a network consists in balancing traffic load among different Internet Gateways , in such a way as to fully exploit the total air-to-ground capacity available at any given time to the airborne mesh network. Geographic Load Share Routing (GLSR) is proposed as a means to achieve load balancing with minimal control overhead, sharing capacity fairly among all airborne nodes, regardless of their current location in the network.