A Position-Based Modified OLSR Routing Protocol for Flying Ad Hoc Networks

Flying Ad-hoc Network (FANET) is an autonomous technology that constitutes Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to establish a wireless network that is ad-hoc in nature. In FANET, without a well-established infrastructure, the UAV nodes within the network can communicate even with a constrained wireless communication range. Because of the rapidly changing network topology and unique characteristics of FANET, the existing routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) or vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are inappropriate. Thus, this paper proposes a 3D position-based modified OLSR routing protocol for efficient MPR selection, which deals with high mobility, topological changes, and energy constraint issues in the existing protocols. The proposed protocol takes into account both energy efficiency: by considering residual energy and node degree of UAVs and frequent topological changes: by combining the 3D-position information of the UAVs, which is used to calculate the link expiration time. The performance of the proposed protocol is mathematically assessed and simulated through the NS-3 simulator. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol enhances packet delivery ratio by 8%, 13.4% and average throughput by 4.46%, 19.67% on an average compared to the existing benchmark protocols “P-OLSR” and “improved OLSR-ETX”, respectively. In addition, the suggested technique minimizes the routing overhead by 6.47%, 4% and end-to-end delay by 18.99%, 25.10% on average compared to the existing protocols “P-OLSR” and “improved OLSR-ETX”, respectively.