Wireless sensors networks as black-box recorder for fast flight data recovery during aircraft crash investigation.

Summary Commercial aircrafts use black box comprising a Flight Data Recorder (FDR) required for crash investigation purposes. While FDR can be easily recovered in crash events on land, the same does not apply to crash events in great deep ocean water. This paper presents a new solution towards solving FDR data recovery using a paradigm called "communicating materials". The solution is developed through uniformly integrating hundreds of tiny sensor nodes in the aircraft structure. The nodes could then construct a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) inside the aircraft. Thus, the latest FDR data could be stored in the nodes using data storage protocol for WSN. The proposed storage protocol uses the probabilistic-based flooding scheme to forward data to all nodes inside the aircraft structure within the lowest delay. To improve reliability and collision-avoidance of flooding, different complementing corrective measures are used based on neighborhood information. The protocol is evaluated using Castalia/OMNeT++ simulator.