A Survey on Cluster-Based Routing Protocols for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Networks

Abstract

In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have gained popularity for various applications and services in both the military and civilian domains. Multiple UAVs can carry out complex tasks efficiently when they are organized as an ad hoc network, where wireless communication is essential for cooperation and collaboration between UAVs and the ground station. Due to rapid mobility and highly dynamic topology, designing a routing protocol for UAV networks is a challenging task. As the number of UAVs increases, a hierarchical routing called clustering is necessarily required to provide scalability because clustering schemes ensure the basic level of system performance such as throughput, end-to-end delay, and energy efficiency. For approximately a half-decade, several survey articles have been reported on topologybased routing and position-based routing for UAV networks. To the best of the authors' knowledge, however, there is no survey on cluster-based routing in the literature. In this paper, cluster-based routing protocols for UAV networks are extensively surveyed and qualitatively compared in terms of outstanding features, characteristics, competitive advantages, and limitations. Furthermore, open research issues and challenges on cluster-based routing are discussed.INDEX TERMS Unmanned aerial vehicle, drone, unmanned aerial vehicle network, flying ad hoc network, routing protocol, clustering algorithm, scalability.In this study, cluster-based routing protocols for UAV networks are extensively surveyed and qualitatively compared in terms of outstanding features, characteristics, competitive advantages, and limitations. The main contributions of this study are as follows:• A comprehensive and state-of-the-art survey on clusterbased routing protocols for UAV networks is provided.

Unmanned aerial vehicle for internet of everything: Opportunities and challenges

“…Optimizing the position and trajectory [126], [128], [133], [144], [176] Intelligent network layer Routing selection [15], [69], [89] Congestion control [177]- [181] Smart access [182], [183] Intelligent application layer High-level control [184]- [187] UAV-enabled intelligent aerial services…”

UAV Swarm Intelligence: Recent Advances and Future Trends

“…Under the condition of a suitable collaborative cylinder, by optimizing the cache size and drone the density maximizes the coverage of the system. Meanwhile, due to the fast mobility and highly dynamic topology of the UAV network, it is necessary to design a clustered layered routing protocol to provide scalability [113].…”

“…This solution provides a feasible and safe management platform for the application of drones in sensitive areas. At the same time, to ensure the safe operation of drones, it is necessary to establish a common term for experts in the avionics and telecommunications industries to better understand the needs of the two fields [113]. In the future, the safety regulations of the drone industry need to be further improved and supplemented to better serve human beings.…”

Network for hypersonic UCAV swarms

“…These protocols can be classified into four major categories: (1) reactive routing; (2) proactive routing; (3) cluster-based routing; and (4) directional antenna-based routing. The four types of routing protocols will be introduced in following, with their pros and cons compared in Table 3 [124]. Any breakthrough for all these protocols would require the location information and link state prediction into the path selection criterion to cope with the rapid topology changes.…”

“…By cluster division, the collisions are largely avoided, and accordingly, end-to-end delay is reduced [127]. An extensive survey on cluster-based routing protocols for unmanned aerial vehicle networks was presented recently [124], in which a handful of promising schemes [128,129] for high mobility scenarios can be found.…”