Collaborative Research: VINES: Track 2: AERONET: AI-enabled Orchestration of Heterogeneous Networks for Aviation Safety

The aviation sector represents a high-impact vertical application with urgent demand for next-generation (NextG) networking capabilities that can support safety-critical, low-latency, and highly reliable communications. The AI-enabled Orchestration of Heterogeneous Networks for Aviation Safety (AERONET) project seeks to develop an architecture that unifies private 5G, Wi-Fi, and multi-orbit satellite networks to deliver always-on, ultra-reliable, high-bandwidth communications across air and ground domains to directly enhance aviation safety, efficiency, and resilience. The resulting technology will significantly reduce air-traffic control workload and miscommunication errors through reliable digital exchange. It will provide pilots with real-time, high-fidelity situational awareness including weather, traffic and airport data by implementing predictive safety monitoring via continuous flight data streaming. The project will improve airport ground operations through resilient surface connectivity. AERONET advances the VINES vision by demonstrating how NextG networking transforms aviation communication to enhance safety, efficiency, resilience, and scalability. It strengthens U.S. leadership in advanced wireless technologies, helps train a diverse workforce and broadly disseminates open-source tools and datasets. The project advances both fundamental knowledge and technological innovations in the orchestration of multiple radio access technologies, intent-based networking, semantic communications, and resilient transport, treating extracted operational semantics as the intent signal that drives real-time orchestration decisions. By extending Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) control frameworks to aviation, triggering policy injections across cellular, Wi-Fi, and satellite interfaces, and preemptively steering multi-path transport ahead of anticipated link degradation, the project pioneers an Artificial Intelligence-native orchestration fabric for mission-critical networks. AERONET technologies address aviation’s unique challenges, such as high-mobility contexts and and safety-critical reliability requirements, while establishing generalizable frameworks applicable to other verticals. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.