Exploiting ETSI MEC to Increase the Safety of Aeronautical Communications

Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) is being standardized by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) to provide computing capabilities near mobile users. A MEC application running on the ground on behalf of an airborne aircraft can both receive data from the aircraft and acquire contextual data through other interfaces (e.g., MEC services made available by the datalink networks). In this paper, we argue that this makes MEC the ideal architectural solution to run applications related to the safety of the aircraft. We provide three concrete examples: multilink policies, whereby an aircraft can select the optimal datalink on which to communicate at any time; avoiding unnecessary handovers involving ground-based datalinks, which would otherwise decrease the availability of connectivity, and black-box offloading, whereby data that are usually stored at the aircraft—and possibly analyzed reactively, following an incident—are instead stored and analyzed in real time by a MEC application.