The Impact of 5G Drones on the Performance of a DTN Destination Based Routing Protocol

Managing and delivering data packets at high frequency e.g., ≤ 28 GHz, using vehicles through delayed tolerant networks in cities is challenging. This is because of the high attenuation of high frequency signals with the presence of obstacles in cities, e.g., buildings. To address this limitation, this paper proposes the use of drones with the ground vehicles as relays to strength the signals and hence improve the DTN performance. We model our network in Opportunistic Network Environment (ONE) simulator to study the effect and impact of using drones with ground vehicles on the performance of DTN destination-based routing protocol. The simulation results show that the use of drones with ground vehicles improves the delivery probability to about 33% and decreases the delay to about 25% as compared to the use ground vehicles without drones.