Urban Air Mobility Implications for Intelligent
Transportation Systems
Boeing Research & Technology
P.O. Box 3707
Seattle
WA
98124
USA
fltemplin@acm.org
I-D
Internet-Draft
Urban Air Mobility concerns the introduction of manned and unmanned
aircraft within urban environments, while Intelligent Transportation
Systems have traditionally considered only terrestrial vehicles
operating on city streets and highways. This document considers the
implications for introduction of low-altitude aircraft within urban
environments operating in harmony with ground transportation.
Urban Air Mobility (UAM) concerns the introduction of manned and
unmanned aircraft within urban environments. Autonomy will play a
pivotal role in the acceptance of low-altitude operations for aerial
vehicles operating in harmony with traditional ground transportation and
pedestrian traffic. The UAM vision therefore builds on evolving works on
Unmanned Air Systems (UAS), including the NASA UAS Traffic Management
(UTM) service model .
Use cases for autonomous aircraft in the UAM vision are endless, and
include personal air vehicles, flying taxis, parcel delivery, law
enforcement and countless others. Major industry leaders such as Airbus
and Boeing have
accordingly begun to articulate their UAM strategies. Programs such as
Uber Elevate anticipate deployment as early
as within the next 2-5 years.
With the advent of the UAM vision and its related initiatives,
questions arise as to how the new model will be harmonized with the
existing terrestrial mobility environment. Directions for modernizing
terrestrial mobility are emerging in programs such as the US Department
of Transportation's Intelligent Transportation Systems and anticipate an increasing role for Vehicle to Vehicle
(V2V) and Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) communications. The IETF
recognizes this need and has formed the IP Wireless Access in Vehicular
Environments (IPWAVE) working group with charter to produce a document
that will specify the mechanisms for transmission of IPv6 datagrams
over dedicated short-range wireless
communications media.
This document anticipates a need to provide a unified V2V and V2I
service for all urban mobility agents, including both terrestrial and
airborne. Urban air vehicles will employ Vertical Takeoff And Landing
(VTOL) and will operate at altitudes below 400 feet, such that
coordinations with terrestrial vehicles will be inevitable and
commonplace. This work therefore proposes that urban air vehicles also
employ a short-range V2V / V2I communications capability using the same
types of wireless networking gear used in the terrestrial domain (e.g.,
DSRC, C-V2X, etc.).
The urban mobility landscape is evolving from a two dimensional to a
three dimensional environment. Vehicles both on the ground and in the
air will therefore need to coordinate with one another on a V2V and V2I
basis even when supporting communications infrastructure such as cell
towers are unavailable or otherwise too congested to support realtime
exchanges. The ipwave working group is therefore advised to consider the
rapidly emerging and inevitable Urban Air Mobility future.
Terms such as Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), Urban Air
Mobility (UAM), Unmanned Air Systems (UAS), UAS Traffic Management (UTM)
and many others apply to the emerging urban mobility landscape. IETF
keywords per are not applicable within the
scope of this document.
Urban Air Mobility and Intelligent Transportation System concepts
apply within all major urban areas worldwide.
UAM end systems will often have multiple data link connections,
including cellular, SATCOM, short-range omni-directional, etc. In order
to provide mobility and multilink services, UAM end systems can employ
an Overlay Multilink Network (OMNI) interface as a virtual Non-Broadcast
Multiple Access (NBMA) connection to the serving ground domain network
over the underlying data links.
The OMNI interface and link model provide a nexus for multilink and
mobility coordination using standard IPv6 Neighbor Discovery (ND)
messaging according to the NBMA principle. This
supports the necessary mobility services with no need for adjunct
mobility messaging, nor modifications to the IPv6 ND messaging services
or link model.
Early prototyping and testing are underway.
This document introduces no IANA considerations.
Communications networking security is necessary to preserve the
confidentiality, integrity and availability necessary for V2V and V2I
coordinations.
Discussions on the IETF ipwave list (its@ietf.org) helped motivate
this document.
This work is aligned with the NASA Safe Autonomous Systems Operation
(SASO) program under NASA contract number NNA16BD84C.
This work is aligned with the FAA as per the SE2025 contract number
DTFAWA-15-D-00030.
This work is aligned with the Boeing Commercial Airplanes (BCA)
Internet of Things (IoT) and autonomy programs.
This work is aligned with the Boeing Information Technology (BIT)
MobileNet program.
http://www.boeing.com/NeXt/common/docs/Boeing_Future_of_Mobility_White%20Paper.pdf
https://utm.arc.nasa.gov/index.shtml
https://www.airbus.com/innovation/Urban-air-mobility-the-sky-is-yours.html
https://www.uber.com/us/en/elevate/
https://www.its.dot.gov/
<< RFC Editor - remove prior to publication >>
Changes from -01 to -02:
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