Aviation data lake: Using side information to enhance future air-ground vehicle networks

Future denser air-ground vehicle networks (AGVNs) face challenges such as resource allocation, mobility management, secure transmission, and so on. At the same time, surveillance is a must for modern air traffic management. This motivates us to find opportunities in the aerial vertical by forming a conceptual surveillance plane for aerial vehicles. In this article, we propose an enhanced software-defined network architecture where the surveillance plane can provide local and global surveillance information to macro stations, acting as a side system for the communication links. We review air- ground communications and, by summarizing challenges and opportunities, propose the enhanced architecture of side-information-assisted networks in detail. We then present how we obtain, organize, manage, and utilize the local and global side information by a so-called aviation data lake (ADL). The data lake can be easily connected with advanced machine learning schemes and, thus, provide timely, context-aware metrics and predictions.