ACERO TCL 1 Airspace Management Data Sharing Performance Analysis

NASA’s Advanced Capabilities for Emergency Response Operations (ACERO) project aims to develop, integrate, demonstrate, and transition airspace management technologies, involving NASA and industry partners, to wildland firefighting operational use. ACERO held its first Technical Capabilities Level (TCL) field evaluation in California in late 2024 and early 2025, the first of a series and thus named TCL 1. These field evaluations are instrumental in validating key aspects of ACERO’s prototype airspace management system for wildland aerial operations.

ACERO’s concept of an airspace management system focuses on enabling a digital “common operating picture” that provides participating users access to aerial operations’ intent, traffic data, as well as supplementary information such as weather, airspace restrictions, terrains, and ground operations in the airspace of interest. This concept allows geographically dispersed teams to share data in real time, and should enable the Air Traffic Group Supervisor (ATGS) to manage and deconflict aerial operations without relying on visual observation from an aircraft, ultimately doing so on the ground. ACERO’s prototype system is called Portable Airspace Management System (PAMS). Initial application of this prototype system focuses on drone operations, although the concept can be readily applied to manned flights as well. Detailed design and considerations of PAMS is described in [1] for interested readers.

Wildland fires progress rapidly and are not entirely predictable. Real-time data sharing adds tremendous value to the effectiveness and safety of aerial operations and plays a crucial role in the enabling of a real-time common operating picture. Communication technologies for sharing digital data among geographically dispersed teams exist but are not all affordable or feasible. Terrain poses a challenge to connectivity, too. TCL 1 field evaluation leverages the use of an ad hoc radio mesh network with an aerial communication relay node, which are expected to overcome most of the restrictions terrains impose on ground-based platforms. This ad hoc radio mesh network can work alone or connect with cellular or satellite networks.

This technical report examines the effectiveness of the radio mesh network in TCL 1 field evaluation in terms of it transmission success rate and latency. Section 2 describes the TCL 1 field evaluation. Section 3 presents the data analysis approach. Section 4 presents calculation results and findings. Section 5 concludes the findings and discusses implications.