Improving Existing VANETs by Incorporating UAVS Using Ant Colony and PSO Algorithms

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) are a type of wireless communication network that enable vehicles to communicate with each other and with roadside infrastructure in a peer-to-peer fashion; despite their vast applications, they come with several shortcomings. The key challenges in their real-world implementation include scalability, connectivity, and coverage issues. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, can complement existing VANETs in several ways to enhance their functionality and address some of their limitations. This paper studies the incorporation of UAVs in VANETs to overcome the challenges faced by the present networks. The approach is based on the dynamic deployment of UAVs in the most optimal positions, found by utilizing Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Ant Colony algorithms which analyze the vehicle density, and previous coverage information in the network. The deployment of UAVs is intended to provide a seamless network coverage for ground vehicles. The impact of dynamic UAV mobility in communicating VANETs is comparatively studied. The simulation is done using Network Simulator-3 (NS3) simulator to evaluate the performance of 4 VANET protocols, AODV, DSR, OLSR, and DSDV, in terms of packet delivery ratio (PDR), Average End-to-End Delay, Throughput, Average Throughput per Packet, Packet Drop Rate, and Normalized Routing Load after incorporating the proposed modification designs. The paper concludes that the incorporation of Ant Colony is better suited to enhance VANETs than PSO.