The Performance of Greedy Geographic Forwarding in Unmanned Aeronautical Ad-Hoc Networks

The availability of accurate location information (for airborne purposes) in unmanned aeronautical ad-hoc networks (UAANETs) makes it possible to deploy geographic routing mechanisms as the main communication protocol in such networks. However, the performance of geographic routing is not obvious, especially for sparse networks (i.e., networks with low connectivity levels). In this paper, the main goal is to explore the effects of network sparsity on the performance of greedy geographic forwarding and to determine in different scenarios the percentage of source-destination pairs that can successfully establish communication based on greedy geographic forwarding only. To that end, Monte Carlo simulations have been performed to collect statistics in estimating the performance of UAANETs in sparse situations. Simulation results show that greedy geographic forwarding can be used for less critical applications of UAANETs. However, for applications with guaranteed delivery requirements, other alternatives should be combined with greedy geographic forwarding.