ROMATSA passes to 2nd generation of IP network for ATC

In late nineties, when formulating the requirements for a new ATC network, ROMATSA choose the IP as basis technology for its communication infrastructure foreseeing that the natural evolution will eventually be manifest also in the ATC community. The principal ATC specific applications which benefited immediately in terms of increased resiliency - from the newly constituted network in spring 2001 were radar data transport form sensor sites to ACCs, A/G voice transport between radio sites and ACCs, G/G voice transport between ACCs, OLDI and AFTN/CIDIN. Such applications were not natively supporting IP at that time but successfully adapted to the IP environment grace to abstraction layers integrated within network. Further added applications are since then required to be IP native as its the case for the newly contracted VCSS for Bucharest-ACC (Arad location) scheduled to becoming operational in autumn 2008. The twofold evolution of STCR (pronounced SETCOR) the ROMATSAs ATC network comprises firstly an architectural enhancement, reflecting 7 years of learned lessons, and secondly a replacement of IP routing and switching equipments with new generations.

Besides the targeted and immediately evident benefits of lowering costs by a more economical use of WAN channels and coherent network management, another crucial advantage of using everything over IP has been revealed. Its about the inherent characteristic of IP to make geographically dispersed sites appearing as a virtual unique entity. Such an unprecedented flexibility offered by the everything over IP paradigm allowed ROMATSA to reduce in autumn 2001 its number of ACCs from 5 to 3, the remaining three centers acting as one unique virtual centre under the name of Bucharest-ACC. Furthermore, these three locations composing the Bucharest-ACC are compliant with the 2 out of 3 redundancy model, the designed contingency procedures being proved in a drill in March 2008.

Almost a decade of know-how concerning IP usage for ATC accumulated by ROMATSA exploiting STCR will soon become available to the ATC community in the form of the EUROCAE WG67 deliverables coauthored by ROMATSAs experts.