Aircraft CDN Distributed Storage for Unreliable Ground Connectivity
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Solution Overview
Problem
Commercial aircraft face challenges in storing large amounts of multimedia content and other data due to limited onboard storage space, high costs, and unreliable connectivity for accessing ground-based servers, which affects data availability and passenger experience.
Innovation Solution
A distributed storage system is implemented onboard the aircraft, combining central and IFE databases via CDN nodes to form a unified storage system, allowing seamless access and management of multimedia content, with a CDN ingest manager anticipating and caching content demands.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Quantity of substance
If data is stored on ground-based servers, then storage capacity is sufficient, but connectivity and bandwidth are unreliable on commercial aircraft
Solution Approach 1:
The system segments the storage function across multiple distributed nodes including ground-based servers, airborne servers, and passenger devices. Each node stores portions of the content library, creating a distributed storage network that eliminates single-point dependency and ensures content availability even when certain nodes are inaccessible.
Solution Approach 2:
The airborne server acts as an intermediary between ground-based servers and passenger devices. It pre-loads and caches content during ground operations, then distributes this cached content to passenger devices during flight when ground connectivity is unavailable, mediating the data flow between reliable ground storage and mobile passenger devices.
2Reliability
If data is stored on onboard servers, then connectivity reliability improves, but storage space is limited and costs increase
Solution Approach 1:
The storage burden is segmented across multiple components: ground-based servers hold the master content library, airborne servers maintain a cached copy for in-flight distribution, and passenger devices store locally-accessible content. This segmentation allows each component to have smaller, more manageable storage requirements while collectively providing extensive content availability.
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs preliminary content loading and caching during ground operations when connectivity is available. The airborne server pre-loads anticipated content into its cache, and the system pre-synchronizes passenger devices with relevant content before departure, ensuring data availability during flight without requiring large onboard storage capacity.
3Speed
If all data is stored locally on the aircraft, then data access speed improves, but storage costs and device complexity increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system implements local quality by caching frequently accessed content and hot data on the airborne server and passenger devices, while less frequently accessed content remains on ground-based servers. This creates a tiered storage architecture where data is stored locally only when it provides immediate value, optimizing access speed for critical content while avoiding the complexity and cost of storing everything locally.
Data Source
AI summary
A content distribution network (CDN) network with a distributed storage system, and associated devices and methods, are disclosed herein. In some implementations, a content distribution network system for an aircraft includes onboard servers and in-flight-entertainment (IFE) devices on the aircraft. Each onboard server can include central applications, a first CDN node, and a central database operably. Each IFE device can include IFE applications, a second CDN node, and an IFE database. The central databases and the IFE databases can form a distributed storage system that is configured to store multimedia content and/or packets of multimedia content in one or more of the central databases and/or the IFE databases. The central applications can be configured to access the distributed storage system via the first and/or second CDN nodes, and the IFE applications can be configured to access the distributed storage system via the first and/or second CDN nodes.