Moth and Ant Inspired Routing in Hierarchical Airborne Networks with Multi-Beam Antennas

A set of novel routing protocols is proposed for directional hierarchical airborne networks. These networks use a two-level architecture, where the higher-level network is sparse with directional long-distance links that support the high data-rate communication. The lower-level network consists of high-density nodes with short-distance and low data-rate links. We assume that the higher-level nodes are equipped with multi-beam antennas, whereas the lower-level nodes have omni-directional antennas. We use the bio-inspired algorithms (based on moth and ant behaviors) to design the routing schemes for both levels. Specifically, we use the male moth's light source pursuing pattern for routing the data from an event node to the highly mobile sink in lower-level network, and the ant's chemical trail maintenance principle to trace the trajectory of commander node to deliver the data from lower-level node to the commander node in the higher-level network, with minimum delay. In addition, we construct a weighted fence routing topology among higher-level nodes with multi-beam antennas, in order to achieve high throughput. Our simulation results demonstrate that significant performance improvement is achieved by the bio-inspired routing schemes, compared with conventional ad hoc routing schemes.