Random Network Coding Enabled Routing Protocol in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Networks

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are becoming important communication infrastructures. One major challenge of communications with UAV networks is the routing protocol design. Due to the inherent characteristics (e.g., dynamic network topology and limited UAV device capabilities), it is difficult to directly apply existing routing protocols that utilize network topology information and routing path explorations. In this article, two novel routing protocols are designed based on random network coding (RNC) for a swarm UAV network, where UAVs operate cooperatively as a swarm, enabling efficient routing process. The first routing protocol utilizes the unique feature of RNC: Original packets can be decoded as long as an UAV accumulates sufficient generations. This property can be used to effectively expedite the underlying routing process. The second routing protocol further improves the efficiency where each forwarding UAV only needs to create a new generation rather than decoding original packets. Accordingly, the duration of each hop can be significantly reduced. Extensive simulations have been conducted to evaluate the performance of the designed routing protocols. The simulation results demonstrate that our designed routing protocols can effectively enhance the performance on both average transmission delay and delay violation probabilities compared to benchmark methods.