Improving Traditional Routing Protocols for Flying Ad Hoc Networks: A Survey

Flying Ad Hoc Network (FANET) technology could provide efficient and reliable cooperative communication for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms. However, the high mobility of UAV will bring intermittent connection of the communication link and rapid change of the network topology, which will lead to the failure of traditional network routing protocols in highly dynamic aerial environment. There are already some improvements to these routing protocols in the literature to enable them to adapt to frequent changes of network topology. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of such improved protocols and summarizes the essence of these improvements. It is found that most of the improvements to traditional routing protocols are to consider more stability-related factors in relay selection, such as link stability and expected link lifetime. At the same time, shortcomings of these improvements are analyzed and possible research directions in the future are pointed out. The conclusions obtained could provide some reference to the design of routing protocol in the FANET.