On the Performance of Flying Ad-hoc Networks (FANETs) with Directional Antennas

The Flying Ad-hoc Networks (FANETs) is relatively a new research area that governs the autonomous movement of multiple and small-sized unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Compared to the traditional ad-hoc networks, FANETs are more efficient in completing their task in catastrophic situations to deliver data communication services from the height. However, type of the mission and sensitivity of the application requires an adaptive, efficient, and scalable communication network for data transmission among the UAVs. Such network are challenged by the high mobility and frequent topology changes, resulting connectivity loss problem. In this context, the UAVs in FANETs have been deployed with omnidirectional antennas, which leads to restrict the overall performance of the network. Alternately, directional antennas have the potential to enhance the transmission range, spatial reuse, and capacity of the network effectively. Nevertheless, these benefits also bring some unique challenges, particularly for the MAC layer. In order to overcome such constraints, we propose a new directional antennas based medium access control (MAC) protocol to adapt the FANETs architecture. The idea is to use multiple directional antennas on a single UAV with IEEE 802.11 protocol. The design goal is to improve the overall performance of the network and to provide solutions to some of the unique challenges of using directional antennas. The integrated solution is modeled in OPNET and evaluated for throughput, end-to-end delay, and retransmission attempts. The simulation results authenticate that the proposed IEEE 802.11-based directional antennas protocol could significantly increase the performance of FANETs as compared to omnidirectional antennas.