A Mobility and Load aware OLSR routing protocol for UAV mobile ad-hoc networks

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are widely used in military and civilian fields, which promotes the need of networking. Due to the complex features of UAV MANET, the development of UAV MANET faces many technical challenges, such as routing. Generally speaking, Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) protocol gives better performance on delay compare to AODV protocol, so the OLSR protocol meets the high demand for real-time of UAV communication. High mobility and load imbalanced are two significant characteristics of UAV networks. The performance of UAV networks is largely affected by these characteristics. In order to reduce the effects of these problems, a Mobility and Load aware OLSR (ML-OLSR) protocol is proposed in this paper. The mobility-aware algorithm and load-aware algorithm are introduced to the OLSR protocol. The modelling and simulation of the ML-OLSR protocol was completed within QualNet simulator. Simulation results show that ML-OLSR outperforms the original OLSR protocol in terms of packet delivery ratio and average end-to-end delay.