EEGW: AN ENERGY-EFFICIENT GREY WOLF ROUTING PROTOCOL FOR FANETS

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or flying drones are employing to retrieve data from their respective sources and help to accomplish Flying Ad hoc Networks (FANETs). These wireless networks deal with challenges and difficulties such as power consumption, packet losses, and weak links between the nodes. This is due to the high mobility of nodes, frequent network partitioning, and uncertain flying movement of the flying drones. Consequently, reduce the reliability of data delivery. Moreover, unbalanced energy consumption results in an earlier failure of flying drone and accelerate the decrease of network life. The performance of FANETs depends on the capabilities of energy consumption of each flying drone. They are expected to live for a longer period to manage the cost overhead. Energy-efficient routing is an important factor that helps in improving the lifetime of FANETs. In this research, we propose an Energy-Efficient Grey Wolf (EEGW) routing protocol for FANETs. This protocol is comprised of Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO) inspired by the leadership hierarchy of grey wolves. It helps in minimizing the energy consumption, packet loss ratio, and aerial transmission loss incurred during transmission.