ATM requires highly available, resilient, and deterministic communications to ensure safe and efficient airspace operations. According to ICAO requirements, critical ATM communications must meet availability levels of 99.999% (five nines), with strict limitations on latency, jitter, and packet loss. These stringent requirements exceed the capabilities of standard commercial networks, which are typically optimised for cost-efficiency rather than ultra-reliable performance. Standard IP networks introduce variable delays, packet loss, and unpredictable failover times, making them unsuitable for safety-critical ATM services without additional optimisations.

To meet these operational requirements, an ATM-grade networking layer is essential. This layer ensures that ATM communications remain resilient, predictable, and fault-tolerant, even in the presence of network degradation, failures, or congestion. Frequentis NetBroker provides the intelligence required to dynamically manage ATM network performance, ensuring uninterrupted service continuity. By continuously monitoring network conditions, NetBroker makes real-time routing decisions, selecting the best available path based on latency, jitter, and packet loss metrics, thus enabling application-aware traffic management and ensuring the highest level of service availability.

Traditional network redundancy mechanisms rely on fixed failover configurations, which lack adaptability to real-time network conditions. This can lead to unnecessary disruptions when a primary link experiences temporary degradation, even when an alternative path could provide better service quality without complete failover. NetBroker overcomes this limitation by implementing dynamic, real-time network routing based on current performance metrics. Using continuous performance monitoring, NetBroker evaluates network paths based on defined KPIs for ATM services, including latency, jitter, and packet integrity. If performance degradation is detected on a primary path, NetBroker automatically re-routes traffic over an optimal alternative path without disrupting ATM services. This application-aware routing ensures that mission-critical ATM communications - such as voice, surveillance, and data distribution - are always transmitted over the most reliable and lowest-latency network route available. NetBroker also integrates with advanced monitoring tools that provide real-time visibility into network performance trends, traffic flows, and SLA compliance, allowing ANSPs to proactively address potential network issues before they impact operations. With this intelligent traffic management, ATM-grade networks can dynamically react to changing network conditions, maximising service uptime and ensuring that safety-critical data is delivered without delay or loss.

Seamless network redundancy with NetBroker Duplicator 

For absolute service continuity, Frequentis introduces the NetBroker Duplicator, an advanced redundancy solution that simultaneously transmits data across two independent networks. This ensures that ATM applications receive duplicate copies of every packet, allowing for loss-free and delay-free handover between network paths. Unlike traditional failover mechanisms that involve switching from one network to another - introducing temporary delays and potential packet loss - NetBroker Duplicator ensures that there is no disruption during network transitions. By duplicating ATM data across multiple network paths, NetBroker Duplicator allows the receiving system to seamlessly reconstruct the original transmission, selecting only the first-arriving packets and discarding duplicates. This guarantees that ATM voice, surveillance, and data services remain completely uninterrupted, even if a primary network experiences latency spikes, packet loss, or temporary disconnections. This dual-path transmission strategy is particularly beneficial for satellite (VSAT) and terrestrial IP hybrid networks, where variations in delay are common. The NetBroker Duplicator ensures that real-time ATM data remains intact, allowing for a smooth, delay-free transition between network paths, thus meeting the high availability requirements for ATM communications. 

Ensuring ATM-grade availability through intelligent network orchestration 

With NetBroker and NetBroker Duplicator, ANSPs can achieve the level of availability, resilience, and service continuity required by ICAO standards. Dynamic traffic management, real-time network monitoring, and intelligent duplication mechanisms provide an advanced ATM-grade networking layer, ensuring that ATM communications remain fail-safe, latency-optimised, and resilient against network disruptions. By leveraging these technologies, ANSPs can move beyond traditional static redundancy models, adopting a proactive, performance-driven approach to network availability. This ensures that voice, surveillance, and ATM data services remain available even in challenging network conditions, providing uncompromised safety and operational efficiency.

Read more about NetBroker and ATM-grade networks