Communication in Congested Sectors

This paper deals with the communication traffic in an air traffic control sector. In order to evaluate the efficiency of these systems, Expected delay times and expected number of delays are vital. A queue model has been applied. Real data from several United States sectors are collected, the arrival rate of messages into the system has the closest distribution to the exponential distribution. The data is used to speculate the relationship between the number of aircraft in the sector and the messaging frequency by each aircraft. As the number of aircraft in the sector increases there is also an increase in the arrival rate of messages per aircraft. This might be due to the feeling of lack of security sensed by pilots and Air traffic control as the sector gets congested. A polynomial is found by the means of regression that indicates the messaging frequency per aircraft as a function of number of aircraft transiting theSector.

Keywords:

Air traffic control (ATC) , Controller , Sector , Queue model , Regression