AMVR: A multicast routing protocol for autonomous military vehicles communication in VANET

Unmanned military vehicles (UMVs) and autonomous robots became part of modern warfare strategy to perform military combat missions and dangerous war field operations. The military vehicles (MVs) need to communicate with each other to achieve several required military tasks collectively. It has been achieved by proposing an autonomous military vehicles routing (AMVR) protocol to develop a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) among all military manned and unmanned vehicles to meet the challenges of modern warfare. AMVR protocol performs multicast communication among unmanned and manned military vehicles in combination to develop strong coordination among them. The proposed protocol performs the message dissemination among MVs in two tier structure i.e. T
₁
and T
₂
which reduces the network overhead by distributing it among the two tiers. The UMVs are grouped in to T
₁
because these vehicles have the capability to arrange them at front autonomously with uniform distance by sharing speed and direction which avoids the occurrence of network fragmentation also. Hence, the UMVs maintain the stable radio links of VANET within dynamic environment of war field. The event detection messages (EDMs) are disseminated from unmanned vehicles to manned military vehicles (MMVs) of T
₂
. The proposed protocol performs multicast communication to achieve high throughput and efficient dissemination of EDMs among all or specific group of military vehicles. The store and carry approach is adopted to inform incoming MVs about the current situation of war field. The simulation results illustrate that the proposed protocol has achieved the goal of EDMs dissemination among all UMVs and MMVs efficiently despite of dynamic battlefield environment.