A Survey on Cluster-Based Routing Protocols for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Networks

In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have gained popularity for various applications and services in both the military and civilian domains. Multiple UAVs can carry out complex tasks efficiently when they are organized as an ad hoc network, where wireless communication is essential for cooperation and collaboration between UAVs and the ground station. Due to rapid mobility and highly dynamic topology, designing a routing protocol for UAV networks is a challenging task. As the number of UAVs increases, a hierarchical routing called clustering is necessarily required to provide scalability because clustering schemes ensure the basic level of system performance such as throughput, end-to-end delay, and energy efficiency. For approximately a half-decade, several survey articles have been reported on topology-based routing and position-based routing for UAV networks. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, however, there is no survey on cluster-based routing in the literature. In this paper, cluster-based routing protocols for UAV networks are extensively surveyed and qualitatively compared in terms of outstanding features, characteristics, competitive advantages, and limitations. Furthermore, open research issues and challenges on cluster-based routing are discussed.