Link-Quality and Traffic-Load Aware Routing for UAV Ad Hoc Networks

With increasingly popular multi-sized unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also referred to as drones, UAV Ad Hoc Networks (UANETs) play an essential role in the realization of coordinating the access of drones to controlled airspace, and providing navigation services between locations in the context of Internet-of-Drones (IoD). Because of the versatility, flexibility, easy installation and relatively small operating expenses of drones, UANETs are more efficient in completing complex tasks in harsh environments, e.g., search and destroy operations, border surveillance, disaster monitoring, etc. However, due to the high mobility, drastically changing network topology, and intermittently connected communication links, existing routing protocols and communication algorithms in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks and Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks cannot be directly applied in UANETs. In this paper, we propose a link-quality and traffic-load aware optimized link state routing protocol, also called LTA-OLSR, to provide efficient and reliable communication and data transmission in UANETs. A link quality scheme is proposed to differentiate link qualities between a node and its neighbor nodes by using the statistical information of received signal strength indication (RSSI) of received packets. A traffic load scheme is also proposed to assure a light load path by taking account of MAC layer channel contention information and the number of packets stored in the buffer. We evaluate the proposed schemes through extensive simulation experiments using OMNeT++ and compare their performance with the original OLSR and DSR protocols. The simulation results indicate that the proposed routing protocol can be a viable approach in UAV Ad Hoc Networks.