A Course-Aware Opportunistic Routing Protocol for FANETs

Abstract

In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have gained popularity in various applications and services in both the military and civilian domains. Compared with the single-UAV scenario, flying ad hoc networks (FANETs) consisting of ground stations (GSs) and UAVs have the advantages of flexible configuration and wide coverage. However, due to significant mobility and highly dynamic topology, designing reliable and efficient routing protocols for FANETs is a challenging task. In this paper, we consider a network that comprises multiple flying UAVs and GSs to transfer messages by multi-hop relaying. We propose a routing protocol, named course-aware opportunistic routing for FANETs (CORF). The UAVs cooperatively exchange aeronautical data with others. The source UAV node (SUN) calculates the transfer probabilities to different neighbors by jointly considering the positions of its neighbors and the destination node. Based on the direction information and the transfer probabilities, the SUN selects the next-hop relay nodes among the neighbor UAVs and GSs. This process continues until the destination node receives the message. The simulation results demonstrate that, the proposed CORF protocol achieves significant performance superiority as compared with the traditional protocols in terms of message delivery rate and network latency.