PSO-OLSR: A Particle Swarm Optimization based Proactive Routing Protocol for UAV Networks

The application spectrum of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has been expanding rapidly in recent years, beyond their intended original use in the military sector, to target many strategic civilian sectors such as agriculture, rescues, surveillance etc. In this paper, we focus on the application of UAVs in disaster scenarios to provide efficient and rapid alternative to the damaged communication infrastructure. In this context, a swarm of UAVs is deployed as a wireless mesh network to provide connectivity to users on the ground and ensure real-time communication between rescue teams. To this end, we proposed a new routing protocol, named Particle Swarm Optimization enabled OLSR (PSO-OLSR) to create and maintain connectivity within the mesh network. PSO-OLSR consists of three phases; the initialization phase where OLSR is used to compute routes that enable UAVs to operate collaboratively. Afterwards, due to UAVs’ high speeds, their dynamically changing topologies, and their three-dimensional mobility, a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) model is designed to maintain the UAVs connectivity within the deployed mesh network. PSO-OLSR’s performance has been evaluated through simulation and compared against the legacy OLSR. The obtained results show that PSO-OLSR outperforms OLSR in terms of packet delivery ratio and end-to-end delay.