Particle Swarm Optimization-Based Content Delivery Protocol for UAV VAENTs

As the capabilities of mobile devices and mobile communication techniques expand, vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) play an increasingly significant role in transportation and traffic management, particularly in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). However, the rapid topology changes, high vehicle mobility, and frequent link disconnections make routing in VANETs a challenging task, necessitating the development of efficient routing protocols. Moreover, as VANET services provided in our daily lives become more extensive and situations in which they are provided simultaneously to an increasing number of users become more frequent, numerous data delivery optimization algorithms have been researched to address these issues. Alongside this, the research related to Unnamed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has also been utilized as a solution to solve the physical data link disconnection problem of VANETs. In this paper, we propose a routing protocol called PSUV (Particle Swarm UAV-VANET). First, we have solved the software-related issues of VANETs by measuring data transmission availability of vehicles existing in the topology and conducting topology optimization by creating a vehicle routing table, utilizing a mathematical value calculation formula that combines Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) from Swarm Intelligence (SI) and the directional vector information of the vehicle. Furthermore, by utilizing UAVs, we address the physical disconnectivity issues that arise during data transmission in VANETs, thereby minimizing the delay and maximizing the total data rate under realistic conditions. Finally, extensive simulations are conducted to validate the superiority of the proposed protocol in various circumstances in an NS-3 simulation. Simulation results indicate that the proposed protocol solves the challenging issues in realistic VANET with significant improvement.