Barrage Relay Network Assisted Multicast Routing Protocol for Spectrum Dissemination in UAV Networks

In the battlefield environment, multi-hop Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) networks struggle with poor link stability, and ensuring the real-time and efficient spectrum dissemination to predefined destinations is crucial for spectrum utilization. Barrage Relay Network (BRN) achieves rapid and reliable broadcast through specific design for tactical edge communication, leveraging autonomous and cooperative relaying among nodes. However, it primarily focuses on broadcast and unicast, and applying it to multicast scenarios incurs inefficient node reuse. In this paper, we introduce a BRN assisted multicast routing protocol for spectrum dissemination within UAV networks. The basic idea of the protocol is to surround all relay nodes with a set of buffer nodes to form a Multicast Controlled Barrage Region (MCBR). We redesign the format of control messages, and propose distributed algorithms to reduce the control message overhead and determine which nodes act as relay and which as buffer. Simulation results indicate that our multicast routing protocol, based on the establishment of MCBR, significantly reduces the overhead and improves the throughput compared to the traditional approaches in the BRN.