In recent decades, the most rapid change in wireless technology has been that flying ad hoc networks (FANETs) played a vital role in telecommunications. FANETs are flexible, inexpensive, and faster to deploy, which has led to the pathway to apply them in various applications such as military and civilian. However, FANETs have high mobility, and frequently changing topology patterns and tri-dimensional space movement make routing a challenging task in FANETs. FANETs differ from vehicular ad hoc network (VANETs) and mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) in terms of features and attributes. It is always a challenge to choose the optimal path in any network using routing protocol. Due to these challenges, the performance and efficiency of the routing protocol have become critical. As network performance metrics like throughput, quality of service, user experience, response time, and other key parameters depends on the efficiency of the algorithm running inside the routing protocol, this chapter presents a novel routing protocol for FANETs in terms of distributed network routing algorithms and data forwarding routing.
TopMotivation
To keep pace with FANET's ever-changing requirements, a routing protocol must be flexible enough to accommodate its highly mobile and dynamic nature. Packet loss, delay, and jitter have a significant impact on a network's ability to provide a high level of service. Second, it must be scalable in order to deliver an appropriate degree of throughput against the network demand. Nodes must be able to preserve energy in order to extend network life spans, which is a third and most essential issue (Wang, Y., et.al., 2018).
Figure 1. (a) One to One UAV network; (b) Many-UAV network.
TopUav Categorization
Rising unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), moderate unmanned aerial vehicles (MAUs), and low-level unmanned aerial vehicles (LAUs) are naturally categorized in FANETs depending on their height. HAUs, comprising satellite, aircrafts, and hot air balloons, are at heights more than 20 kilometers and are virtually completely stationary in their flight path. (Zheng, Z. et.al., 2018), MAUs soar at moderate altitudes up to 11 kilometers above the ground, similar to aircraft, and move more swiftly in the sight of ground nodes. However, this has changed recently. Certain unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been categorized based on a variety of qualities in order to communicate with base stations, land node (e.g., cars or ships), and spacecraft. Data transmission between UAV nodes requires the use of a routing mechanism. In many cases, VANET and MANET-specific ad hoc network routing protocols fail to meet the needs of FANETs (Singh, K., et.al., 2019).
Developing successful routing protocols for FANETs is difficult because of the unique properties of FANETs, such as flying in three dimensions, a low node density, fast topology changes, broken links, network segmentation, and a lack of resources (Wang, H., et.al., 2018).
In the context of FANET applications, service quality (QoS) is a crucial component. Actual data transmission with minimum latency is required for monitoring and reporting, as well as rescue operations (SAR). Many studies have been done to build routing protocols that take into account the requirements of the applications and the unique characteristics of FANETs. Either new ad hoc routing protocols or improvements to already existing ones are being discussed. Various FANETs routing strategies have been addressed in several reviews (da Cruz, E. P. F. et.al., 2018). Highlights and drawbacks of these studies are summarised in Table 1.