Design And Implementation Of In-flight Entertainment Network Management System Based On SNMP

In-flight entertainment(IFE) system is loaded in the aircraft cabin. I t not only provides various entertainment services to passengers, including audio, video, game, business, etc, but also provides valuable flight data to the airlines. Due to the complicated network environment and the special application scenario of aviation, network management is particularly important to IFE system. The network management system can quickly find and solve problems by the real-time monitoring of running status and the storage of operation data, in order to increase the reliability and stability of the IFE system.The management system desig ned in this paper is implemented based on simple network management protocol(SNMP). In addition because the software development environment of IFE system is Linux, an open source software package named Net-SNMP is available for the development, so as to reduce the workload of project. Without changing the original IFE system’s architecture and software, a network management mechanism will be added based on SNMP. T he various data of IFE system will be accessed in real-time, and displayed on the page of cabin management terminal(CMT). And the main research contents include:Firstly, the IFE system architecture needs to be abstracted away and rebuilded. T hen this paper shows the development process how to add the private MIB node into Net-SNMP. A shell script was written in order to solve the problem of different compiled methods according to different device, including server, CMT, APs, etc. After that, the essential configuration files should be modified to satisfy the design requirements, as well as the configuration of the proxy function on server.Secondly, without changing the original IFE system architecture, this paper designs the network management system from the software point of view. Then the division of subsystem, the establishment of proprietary protocol and the design of software interface will be expounded detail by detail. Furthermore, This paper also describes the main process durin g the running of the system, including the registration process when system startup, the cancellation process when an equipment shut down, the process of Get/Set equipment information, and the process of reporting a trap.Finally, this paper designs the displayed pages on management terminal. Through them, those real-time data s accessed from the network management system can be presented to the managers. T he displayed pages can be roughly divided into four categories, i.e., the monitoring panel, the various equipment monitoring pages, the trap information page and the graphic monitoring page. Managers can check the temperature of CPU, the disk utilization, the network traffic, the running situation of proprietary apps, and so on through the pages.In the future, the IFE system will communicate with Ground Management Center(GMC) by satellite. This paper also simply introduces the GMC Agent module running on the network management system, which realizes the communication between IFE and GMC. T his paper briefly analyzes the future development direction of the IFE network management system as well.