A Hop-count and Neighbor-count based Routing Protocol for Flying Ad-hoc Networks

Flying ad-hoc networks (FANETs) consist of un-manned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that perform data exchanges in constrained and frequently changing environments. Routing data in FANETs is difficult due to the inherent properties of the network and the environmental characteristics, and a routing protocol that considers all these properties is really needed. In this work, we consider popular routing protocols from the field of ad-hoc networking and a few recently proposed routing protocols for FANETs, and carry out simulation based experiments to measure their performance in a simulated FANET environment. Based on their measured performance, we identify the applicability issues of these protocols in FANETs.We propose hn-AODV, an improved routing protocol for FANETs, which considers the two important properties namely the number of neighbors and the hop count along the identified paths. During the path finding process of hn-AODV, if the sequence number of Route Request or Route Reply message is greater than the sequence number of the stored route request or route reply message maintained in a node, then hn-AODV will operate similar to the well-known ad-hoc on demand distance vector routing protocol. In the case where the sequence numbers are found to be equal, hn-AODV considers the hop count and the number of neighboring nodes along the path to resolve the tie. Our simulation based experiments show that the proposed hn-AODV shows a better performance when compared to other well-known protocols. Our proposed algorithm also yields the lowest end-to-end delay than the well-known protocols.