Learning-Based Energy-Efficient Anti-Jamming FANET Routing with QoS Guarantee

Reinforcement learning (RL) based flying ad-hoc network (FANET) routing enables unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to choose the next-hop to forward the packets, but the quality of service (QoS) and energy efficiency have to be enhanced due to the inaccurate path quality estimation under jamming attacks. In this paper, we propose an RL based energy-efficient anti-jamming FANET routing scheme with QoS guarantee to optimize both the transmit power and the originator message broadcast interval for the route discovery to estimate the path quality to select the next-hop from the routing table. Based on the path availability history, the channel conditions and the received jamming power, as well as the transmission quality regarding the number of the received originator messages and the bit error rate during route discovery, the routing policy is selected to enhance the throughput and the energy efficiency under jamming attacks with changing power. The backward estimation of the throughput in the utility evaluation addresses the delayed feedback from the destination under large-scale networks. The deep neural networks are further designed to address the quantization error of the transmission quality and the channel gain for UAVs with high mobility to enhance the path exploration efficiency. In addition, the upper bound in terms of network topology and channel gain is derived based on the Nash equilibrium of the anti-jamming routing game. The proposed routing scheme is implemented to improve the image transmission quality against jamming in outdoor environments. Experimental results based on UAVs equipped with Raspberry Pi show the performance gain of the throughput and the energy consumption.