Mobility Prediction Based Virtual Routing for Ad Hoc UAV Network

Due to the three dimensional mobility advantage of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), a swarm of UAVs can be conveniently deployed and work cooperatively to enlarge the coverage and relay data for environment monitoring and emergency communication scenarios. However, the high mobility of UAV brings new challenges to guarantee the robust and efficient routing in a dynamic changing network topology. Therefore, a mobility prediction based virtual routing (MPVR) algorithm is proposed to enhance the performances of connectivity and routing lifetime among cooperative UAVs. And the probability density function of UAV movements is theoretically achieved using the Gaussian distribution model. Moreover, an optimal virtual routing model is designed to select the optimal relay node with the minimum distance between UAVs. Finally, our proposed MPVR algorithm is evaluated by simulation results, which can improve the average routing lifetime, the average link delay, and the packet delivery ratio compared to other conventional algorithms.