A UC Riverside computer science professor will join a $4.8 million National Science Foundation-funded research effort aimed at making aviation safer by developing smarter and more reliable communications for aircraft and airports.
Distinguished Professor Kadangode “K.K.” Ramakrishnan will contribute his foundational computer networking expertise to AERONET, short for AI-enabled Orchestration of Heterogeneous Networks for Aviation Safety.
“Pilots and air traffic controllers depend on receiving critical information quickly and reliably,” said Ramakrishnan. “Our goal is to make these communication networks more intelligent and resilient, so important safety information gets through even as network conditions are changing.”
AERONET will explore how artificial intelligence can coordinate 5G cellular, Wi-Fi, and satellite networks to provide reliable, low-delay communications in the air and on the ground.
The research addresses a major challenge in modern aviation. Aircraft and airports increasingly depend on a constant flow of digital information, but no single communications network is available or reliable everywhere.
For example, an aircraft may have access to cellular, Wi-Fi, and satellite connections at different points during a flight. The quality and availability of those connections can change as the aircraft moves. Meanwhile, safety-related information may need to take priority over less critical communications.
AERONET researchers plan to develop an intelligent system that can recognize those changing conditions and automatically harness these networks to carry information with suitable priority. AERONET also plans to investigate continuous streaming of flight data for predictive safety monitoring as well as more resilient communications for airport ground operations.
The project will be led by Puneet Sharma of Hewlett Packard Enterprise Lab, known as HPE. In addition to Ramakrishnan, the research team will include Professor Jasenka Rakas of UC Berkeley, Professor Swarun Kumar of Carnegie Mellon University, and Professor Dimitrios Koutsonikolas of Northeastern University.
Ramakrishnan is also joining a U.S. Department of Energy-funded project announced earlier this year. The project, called Science-Aware Network Operations for Research Networks (SciNet), aims to move enormous amounts of scientific data more quickly and reliably among laboratories and computing facilities, enabling scientists to share experimental resources across facilities. SciNet is led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, with UCR, Caltech, and HPE Labs as partners.
Ramakrishnan is a member of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UCR’s Bourns College of Engineering.
He has been widely recognized for his fundamental contributions to communication network technology, including his work on data congestion control, traffic management, and VPN services. He has published over 300 papers and has 186 patents issued in his name.
