Improving Automatic Position Reporting System (APRS) throughput and reliability

[摘要] The Automatic Position Reporting System (APRS) is a well-established packet communicationprotocol that offers users a graphical position display system and a peer-to-peertextual message service. APRS is used in temporary and mobile networks where rapiddeployment of infrastructure is required and limited a priori knowledge of the networktopology is available. The APRS protocol can be used for emergencies and public serviceapplications.ARPS, functioning as an access network, was originally designed to require low complexityand support high flexibility of a network. These design directives have limited APRS'sperformance by resulting in low throughput and poor reliability. In order for APRS to beused in time-critical applications, these limitations would need to be improved.The thesis considers the limitations of ARPS by proposing an improved protocol stackwith a substitution of the media access control (MAC) layer. The new protocol is modelledin order to develop a largely platform-independent implementation, which could beefficiently retargeted for different platforms. Lastly, a protocol performance evaluation isdone in order to determine the resulting improvements on APRS and the overall viabilityof the proposal.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University