A Hybrid Reactive Routing Protocol for Decentralized UAV Networks
🤖 AI Summary
To address frequent route disruptions and multi-flow QoS provisioning challenges in low-SWaP fixed-wing UAV networks—caused by high mobility and dynamic topologies—this paper proposes a novel “pipeline-based” hybrid routing mechanism. The mechanism triggers on-demand path discovery, integrates local topology awareness with lightweight link-quality prediction, and proactively constructs a maintainable “communication pipeline” around the primary route to enable pre-failure handover. It operates without global topology knowledge, significantly reducing control overhead and computational complexity. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to reactive protocols like AODV, the approach improves throughput by 32% and reduces route discovery frequency by 57%; it also consistently outperforms proactive protocols such as OLSR across varying node densities, speeds, and traffic loads. Thus, it effectively supports reliable multi-service transmission in highly dynamic airborne networks.
Application Category
📝 Abstract
Wireless networks consisting of low SWaP, FW-UAVs are used in many applications, such as monitoring, search and surveillance of inaccessible areas. A decentralized and autonomous approach ensures robustness to failures; the UAVs explore and sense within the area and forward their information, in a multihop manner, to nearby aerial gateway nodes. However, the unpredictable nature of the events, relatively high speed of UAVs, and dynamic UAV trajectories cause the network topology to change significantly over time, resulting in frequent route breaks. A holistic routing approach is needed to support multiple traffic flows in these networks to provide mobility- and congestion-aware, high-quality routes when needed, with low control and computational overheads, using the information collected in a distributed manner. Existing routing schemes do not address all the mentioned issues. We present a hybrid reactive routing protocol for decentralized UAV networks. Our scheme searches routes on-demand, monitors a region around the selected route (the pipe), and proactively switches to an alternative route before the current route's quality degrades below a threshold. We empirically evaluate the impact of pipe width and node density on our ability to find alternate high-quality routes within the pipe and the overhead required to maintain the pipe. Compared to existing reactive routing schemes, our approach achieves higher throughput and reduces the number of route discoveries, overhead, and resulting flow interruptions at different traffic loads, node densities and speeds. Despite having limited network topology information, and low overhead and route computation complexity, our proposed scheme achieves superior throughput to proactive optimized link state routing scheme at different network and traffic settings. We also evaluate the relative performance of reactive and proactive routing schemes.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Drone Networks
Adaptive Routing
Information Dissemination
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Drone Network Routing
Dynamic Adjustment
Efficiency and Stability
🔎 Similar Papers
No similar papers found.
