Flying ad-hoc networks are becoming a promising solution for different application scenarios involving unmanned aerial vehicles, like urban surveillance or search and rescue missions. However, such networks present various and very specific communication issues. As a consequence, there are several research studies focused on analyzing their performance via simulation. Correctly modeling mobility is crucial in this context and although many mobility models are already available to reproduce the behavior of mobile nodes in an ad-hoc network, most of these models cannot be used to reliably simulate the motion of unmanned aerial vehicles. In this article, we list the existing mobility models and provide guidance to understand whether they could be actually adopted depending on the specific flying ad-hoc network application scenarios, while discussing their advantages and disadvantages.

Scalable routing for wireless communication systems is a compelling and challenging task. To this aim, routing algorithms exploiting geographic information have been proposed. These algorithms refer to nodes by their location, not address, and use those coordinates to route greedily, when possible, towards a destination. With the advent of unmaned airborn vehicle (UAV) technology, a lot of research effort has been devoted to extend position-based packet routing proposals to three dimensional environments. In this context, Drone Ad-hoc Networks (DANETs), comprised of autonomous flying vehicles, pose several issues. This work focuses on the state-of-the-art, stateless geographic packet routing protocols conceived or adapted for three-dimensional network scenarios. Proposals are evaluated in a common scenario through a comprehensive comparative analysis.

The number of physical objects connected to the Internet constantly grows and a common thought says the IoT scenario will change the way we live and work. Since IoT technologies have the potential to be pervasive in almost every aspect of a human life, in this paper, we deeply analyze the IoT scenario. First, we describe IoT in simple terms and then we investigate what current technologies can achieve. Our analysis shows four major issues that may limit the use of IoT (i.e., interoperability, security, privacy, and business models) and it highlights possible solutions to solve these problems. Finally, we provide a simulation analysis that emphasizes issues and suggests practical research directions.

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In this paper, we propose GeoSaW, a delay-tolerant routing protocol for Airborne Networks in Search and Rescue scenarios. The protocol exploits the geographical information of UAVs to make appropriate message forwarding decisions. More precisely, the information about the future UAV’s motion path is exploited to select the best UAV carrying the message towards the destination. Simulation results show that the proposed solution outperforms the classic DTN routing protocols in terms of several performance metrics.

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The pervasive use of technology in the urban environment requires evolved algorithms able to deliver messages across vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs). These networks could be exploited to run a vast plethora of applications, including critical ones such as emergency message distribution. The state-of-the-art broadcasting solutions are based on providing vehicles with different probabilities of forwarding the message in order to reduce message collisions and the number of hops to cover a certain area of interest. In this article, we examine a class of these propagation algorithms, discussing their model analysis and performance evaluation. Furthermore, we propose a possible algorithm's extension introducing a dynamic setting of parameters according to the vehicular network's conditions.