Toronto Airport Case Study Wireless Applications
Toronto Airport Case Study – Wireless Applications
Introduction:
Overview
In 1994, the Greater Toronto Airports Authority (GTAA) began planning to rebuild Terminal 1 at the Toronto Pearson airport. The GTAA is a not-for-profit authority that was appointed to operate the airport under agreement with the government of Canada. As part of this effort, the GTAA intended to shift to a new model of infrastructure – common use(Briody 2004).
Traditionally, in most North American airports, the gates have been “dedicated” to the use of a single carrier. That is, the airline usually has an exclusive lease and exclusive use of specific gates in the airport terminals. The airline installs its own data network, its own voice system, and its own proprietary computer terminals. The implications are that the “owning” carrier essentially locks out any other airline from utilizing that particular gate even if it is idle.
With the common use approach, airlines do not have exclusive use of specific gates and airline proprietary IT systems are not used. Instead, the airport infrastructure is set up to support the flexible reconfiguration of gates, check-in counters, security, and baggage systems to different airlines on an as-needed basis. It is intended to aid in the flexible movement of passengers and planes around the airport to match the demands at a given point in time. This flexibility is intended to increase airport efficiency by sharing space and resources more effectively(ARUP 2004). This also has the advantage of letting the airlines focus on their core competencies rather than having to be IT experts.
The $4.4 billion terminal and its supporting common use infrastructure were put into service in April 2004(Rosencrance 2004).
Business Problems
This approach has a significant impact on the IT infrastructure within the airport terminal. With a common use approach, the airport authority installs and manages the IT infrastructure including:
Data Network
Traditional “wired” networks
Extensive use of wireless networks
Telecommunications
Security Systems (including video feeds)
Standardized Hardware and Software
Several business issues faced the GTAA in trying to implement the common use approach. Air Canada was the dominant carrier at Pearson airport with over 60% of the airport’s traffic. As the dominant carrier, Air Canada feared the loss of any competitive advantage it might have due to exclusive use of its gates (which could form a barrier against competitors). There was also a fear of losing self-sufficiency.
Since Air Canada felt that its IT network was already superior to those of its competitors, they perceived the common use approach as “leveling the playing field” and did not see any advantage in going to this approach. Therefore, GTAA had to incorporate “best-in-class” technology and provide excellent performance to offset this reluctance. Extensive utilization of wireless applications was one area that GTAA felt it could provide significant flexibility and advantages for the airline customers.
Performance/Survivability Problems
One of the key decisions of the implementation was to utilize an end-to-end integrated IP network. This IP network was not only used for data traffic, but also carried voice telecommunications and security camera video feeds. Wireless access is also a key component in the overall network design(Briody 2004).
Some key performance/survivability problems that the implementation at GTAA needed to consider were:
Managing performance of a diverse set of data types (voice, data, video) in an integrated network
Reliable performance of both wired and wireless network applications
Fast reconfiguration of network components, servers, and PCs to meet the needs of multiple customers.
Reliable interfaces between the GTAA common-use systems and off-site carrier proprietary systems.
Appropriate sparing and failover mechanisms to achieve a high degree of fault tolerance while maintaining overall cost efficiency.
Identified below is a list of potential performance/survivability requirements that should be considered across the whole network at Pearson Terminal:
Maintain voice QoS levels at adequate levels under varying data traffic loads.
Network must be engineered to handle peak data traffic loads while maintaining adequate voice and video stream performance.
No single point of failure in data network or application server hardware.
Single point of failure is allowed for individual workstations
Workstations have diverse connections to redundant networks
Continuous operation (fault tolerant) for application server (redundancy with hot failover) hardware that supports any direct customer interactions.
Repair time of any failed hardware within 2 hours.
Spare workstations available for replacement at gates or check-in counters within 15 minutes
Robust backup/recovery systems for data on application servers.
Goals and Objectives of the Study
This study will focus on the wireless aspect of the network as this is one of the newer technologies being deployed in this application. The focus will be on the services and applications utilizing the wireless portion of the common use infrastructure utilized by GTAA for the Toronto airport. This study will look at the necessary business continuity planning aspects of the wireless portions of the network (and how the wireless portion of the network interconnects to the remaining part of the infrastructure.
