3D Location Oriented Routing in Flying Ad-Hoc Networks for Information Dissemination

A Flying Ad-hoc Networks (FANETs) is an autonomous technology that creates a self-organized wireless network via Unmanned Arial Vehicles (UAVs). In this network, all UAVs can communicate within a restricted range of wireless communication in the absence of fixed infrastructure. As a result of high mobility, the limited energy, and the communication range of UAVs, network forming and deformation between them are very frequent that causes packet delivery failure. Therefore, a stable route is always needed to ensure effective data dissemination between source and destination in FANETs. Since it has drastically changing network topology, therefore, to maintain the stable route during packet transmission, there is a need for a suitable routing protocol. This paper proposes an Optimized Location-Aided Routing (O-LAR) protocol which is the modified version of Location-Aided Routing (LAR) protocol. Our protocol’s novelty comes from the fact that it established an optimal route between UAVs for information dissemination towards their respective destination UAV by considering weight function. A weighted function is used to decide the best next-hop node selection based on the parameters like residual energy, distance, and UAV movement direction. The performance of the O-LAR is evaluated mathematically and simulated through the NS-2 simulator. The empirical results attest that O-LAR improves the link duration, network lifetime, packet delivery ratio, and average throughput compared with the state-of-the-art protocols: LEPR, D-LAR, and LAR. Further, the proposed scheme reduces the number of next-hops, routing overhead and end-to-end delay compared to the state-of-the-art protocols.