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.