Robust and Reliable Predictive Routing Strategy for Flying Ad-Hoc Networks

Ever-increasing demands for portable and flexible communications have led to rapid growth in networking between unmanned aerial vehicles often referred to as flying ad-hoc networks (FANETs). Existing mobile ad hoc routing protocols are not suitable for FANETs due to high-speed mobility, environmental conditions, and terrain structures. In order to overcome such obstacles, we propose a combined omnidirectional and directional transmission scheme, together with dynamic angle adjustment. Our proposed scheme features hybrid use of unicasting and geocasting routing using location and trajectory information. The prediction of intermediate node location using 3-D estimation and directional transmission toward the predicted location, enabling a longer transmission range, allows keeping track of a changing topology, which ensures the robustness of our protocol. In addition, the reduction in path re-establishment and service disruption time to increase the path lifetime and successful packet transmissions ensures the reliability of our proposed strategy. Simulation results verify that our proposed scheme could significantly increase the performance of flying ad hoc networks.