ABPP: An Adaptive Beacon Scheme for Geographic Routing in FANET

Flying Ad hoc Network (FANET) is a special type of Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) consisting of a swarm of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). And FANET is required to allow two or more UAVs to communicate directly or via relay UAV(s). To achieve stable communication in FANET, a routing protocol targeted to fast-moving FANET nodes is necessary. Among the existing MANET routing protocols, geographic routing protocol is a promising candidate, as routing decision is made only according to position information, and there is no need to maintain a routing table. Due to fast topology change in FANET, existing geographic routing protocols need to send beacon packets (or hello packets) frequently to maintain the correctness of routing selection. However, high beacon frequency means high overhead, which will lead to collisions with data packet and transmission delay. To overcome this problem, we propose an adaptive beacon scheme called ABPP. ABPP can adjust beacon frequency dynamically and predict the future positions of UAVs. Experimental results show that the proposed ABPP scheme can effectively decrease the beacon overhead and improve the packet delivery ratio.