Elastic Routing Mechanism for Flying Ad Hoc Network

Flying Ad-Hoc Network (FANET) is a hot topic in current research. The design of routing mechanism is challenging because when the scale of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) nodes is large, vast amount of routing overhead may lead to network collapse. An elastic routing mechanism is proposed for large-scale small UAVs multitasking scenarios. Firstly, the New-Unifying Connected Dominating Set (N-UCDS) algorithm is proposed to construct a virtual backbone network based on the connected dominating set. The number of neighboring nodes, remaining energy and link duration are considered to influence the UAV network performance when electing backbone nodes. Secondly, by deploying and running the New Better Approach to Mobile Ad-Hoc Network-Advanced (NBATMAN-ADV) routing protocol on the backbone nodes, the link quality can be evaluated by using the received signal strength index and signal-to-noise ratio of the physical layer data. In this way, the change of the link can be quickly sensed while reducing the routing overhead. The simulation results show that the routing protocol proposed in this paper has significantly improved average packet delivery rate, end-to-end delay and received throughput compared with other traditional proactive routing protocols.