CASE STUDY
By Nabil Khalil, Executive Vice
President R&M Middle East,
Turkey and Africa
www.rdm.com
Istanbul Grand Airport (IGA), the largest airport in the world,
is the world’s first airport to be fully digitised. The new
airport replaces Atatürk Airport, which will soon be closed for
passenger flights.
The recently opened first section of the airport processes
90 million passengers every year. Three additional
construction phases will be completed over the next 15 years;
on completion of all four phases, the state of the art airport
will measure 76.5 million square metres. The new airport will
host flights to more than 350 destinations with an annual
passenger capacity of up to 200 million and will have six
active runways, 250 aircraft and parking for 18,000 cars.
Across the aerospace industry, digitisation is a key topic,
although keeping up with fast technology developments
is a major challenge. With the increased utilisation and
dependence on IT systems in air travel, a high-performance
cabling network is now the critical platform for the airport’s
entire internal and external telecommunications plus other
operational applications and services.
A network of security
In 2015, the airport’s project team put together a
roadmap, in order to integrate a wide variety of information
technologies into airport operations one at a time; airport IT
systems were completed in 2017. Eight people work at the
airport’s two in-house cybersecurity centres 24/7, and 10
more are in training. Other innovations in use at the airport
are advanced face recognition and biometric security, robot
assistants and cameras that can analyse human behaviour
and alert staff if luggage is left unattended.
The site’s perimeter is highly protected with ground radar,
CCTV cameras at 60-metre intervals, pan, tilt and zoom
cameras every 360 metres, thermal cameras and fibre optic
sensors every 720 metres. The active terminal building uses
up to 9,000 surveillance cameras and 3,000 card readers in
real-time, with confidence that they will be protected against
any transmission interference or loss. 5,000 trouble-free and
fail-safe Wi-Fi access points provide the airport with full-
coverage WLAN.
Cabling connects ICT infrastructures for customs, the
27
The benchmark for new airport
developments has been set with
this innovative approach
security staff and police force and links announcement
system, fire alarms, cameras, card access systems, flight
management, ATC systems and more. Artificial Intelligence is
used to regulate temperature and determine when runways
require maintenance, and RFID baggage tracking informs
travellers when their baggage has been dropped on a specific
carousel so that they don’t need to wait in the baggage claim
area – the same technology is also used as the foundation for
the airport’s lost and found luggage system. A digital airport
map with indoor navigation helps both passengers and
employees find their way around the airport.
The backbone of the network
The airport aims to provide travellers, logistics companies
and airlines with a guarantee of 99.982% reliability (TIER III
class). IGA is the first airport to receive a Tier 3 data centre
technology certificate. The mission-critical airport data centre
measures 4,000m 2 and houses 6,000 servers. There are
90,000 RJ45 ports at the airport, and cabling is guaranteed to
last at least 25 years and remain unconditionally reliable.
In the first phase of construction, 5,400km of copper
cabling and 3,270km of fibre optic cabling were installed, as
well as fibre optic distribution cabinets, patch and 115,000
connector ports. To accommodate the vast number of
connections required and to support changes in the future,
a fibre optic management platform was chosen because
it features the world’s highest connection density of up to
120 ports per rack unit. Management of the entire cabling
infrastructure is centralised and automated.
All of the network areas had to be designed in accordance
with individual plans. When it comes to airports, the ability to
be able to accurately coordinate complex installations over a
long project duration while consistently delivering the same
level of quality are essential. This requires highly organised
professional project management teams on-site, allowing
allow IGA’s IT team to rapidly and conveniently scale the
network as needed. Thanks to their modular design, the
cabling systems are able to keep pace with the expansion of
the airport and can be scaled up and branched out with just a
few simple steps. n
www.networkseuropemagazine.com