SARP: Service-Aware Routing Protocol in Task-Oriented FANET

With the development of Flying Ad-Hoc Networks (FANETs) technology, FANET routing protocols have attracted more researchers’ attention. Moreover, FANET traffic is usually task-related, so it is crucial to design a task-oriented FANET routing protocol. Named Data Networking (NDN) is a content-centric communication architecture. Compared with the traditional end-to-end communication model, NDN is more concerned about the content and has more potential in task-oriented FANET. However, existing NDN schemes lack awareness of node capabilities, consequently leading to blindly forwarding requests. In addition, traditional broadcast-based forwarding strategies in NDN face fierce competition. To address these issues, we propose a Service-Aware Flying Ad-Hoc Network Routing Protocol with NDN, abbreviated as SARP, which expands the concept of traditional NDN content into services. SARP comprises two components: i) A local-scale service availability information announcement mechanism to perceive Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) service capabilities. ii) A task-oriented two-phase forwarding strategy to reduce UAVs’ load and transmission overhead. We compared SARP with existing schemes in ndnSIM and deployed it in the real world. Experimental results show that SARP reduces service response time by 60% and traffic consumption per response by 50% and increases the service response ratio by 20%.