Evaluating the Impact of Beacon Interval and Neighbor Timeout Timer on the Performance of Geographical Routing in FANETs

Abstract

Geographical routing provides a robust and scalable routing solution for Flying Ad Hoc Networks (FANETs). In this, the reliability of forwarding decisions depends on the accuracy of the position information of neighboring nodes stored in the neighbor table. Each node broadcasts beacon packets to exchange its position with neighboring nodes after a fixed time interval known as beacon interval (BI) to construct the neighbor table. The node that receives the beacon packet adds an entry in its neighbor table for the originator of a beacon. That entry is valid only for a specific time called neighbor timeout timer (N TOT ). The fixed value setting of beacon interval and neighbor timeout timer may deteriorate the routing performance in a dynamic scenario like FANETs, where network characteristics change frequently. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate the impact of fixed beacon interval and fixed neighbor timeout timer on the performance of geographical routing. To do so, extensive simulations are conducted by varying the value of beacon interval and neighbor timeout timer for different network settings in ns-3. The simulation results demonstrate that the beacon interval and neighbour timeout timer significantly affects the performance of geographical routing. Also, geographical routing exhibits the best performance at BI = 0.5s and N TOT = 1.5s in most network conditions.

MF‐DLB: Multimetric forwarding and directed acyclic graph‐based load balancing for geographic routing in FANETs

“…The regular beacon transmission increases control overhead, bandwidth consumption, and energy expenditure. 24,39,40 Thus, beaconless geographic routing schemes have been proposed for UAV networks. 32,41 In beaconless routing, a current forwarding node or a custodian broadcasts a packet, and neighboring nodes present in the forwarding area, termed tentative custodians, are eligible to forward the packet based on delay timers.…”

“…In geographic routing, nodes broadcast beacons or hello messages periodically to exchange position information with neighboring nodes. The regular beacon transmission increases control overhead, bandwidth consumption, and energy expenditure 24,39,40 . Thus, beaconless geographic routing schemes have been proposed for UAV networks 32,41 .…”

AFB-GPSR: Adaptive Beaconing Strategy Based on Fuzzy Logic Scheme for Geographical Routing in a Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET)

“…Besides that, a high mobility of nodes may change the network density from sparse to dense or vice versa. In consequence, this will increase the links' breakages of one-hop neighbor nodes and degrade the accuracy of neighbors' awareness [17,18].…”

“…Beacons are very small messages; they include parameters such as the position, velocity, and direction of mobility of the nodes. Such key information is utilized to build the routing decisions by estimating various network measures such as geographical distance, expected transmission count (ETX), defined as the neighbor link reliability, signal strength, stability, and link lifetime (link duration) [8,15,[17][18][19]. In sparse networks, for example, broadcasting beacons with high transmission power is essential to expand the awareness area or communicate with distant nodes in mobile wireless environments.…”

“…Once the nodes' topologies change rapidly, the nodes may need to increase their beaconing frequency to obtain more accurate information on neighbors. But even so, this will eventually lead to high control-traffic overhead, excessive use of energy, an increase in data network congestion and a high delay [17,18]. Therefore, it is essential to make a balance or an adaptation in choosing the beacon interval time (BIT) value (i.e., beacon rate) according to the network's requirements and features.…”