New Geographical Routing Protocol for Three-Dimensional Flying Ad-Hoc Network Based on New Effective Transmission Range

Flying ad-hoc network (FANET) consisting of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has the merits of rapid deployment, widespread coverage, and independence of infrastructure. Designing a reliable and robust routing protocol for FANET is essential and challenging. This article proposes a robust and reliable geographical routing protocol, named best-link and three-dimensional (3D) perimeter forwarding routing protocol (BLPR). Different from the existing studies based on a constant transmission range assumption, we propose a more practical metric of time-varying effective transmission range (ER). Considering the wireless channel propagation and the interference from other UAVs, the expression for ER is derived. Then, we propose a new best-link forwarding strategy, which selects the next-hop relay to forward data from a relay selection region specified by the ER being the radius. Furthermore, a routing recovery model, named 3D perimeter forwarding strategy, is designed to avoid local optima. Numerical experiments on the NS-3.29 platform demonstrate that the BLPR achieves significant performance gains over traditional 3D geographical routing algorithms and a state-of-the-art centralized routing protocol in terms of packet delivery ratio and throughput.