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

Abstract

SummaryFlying ad hoc network (FANET) comprising unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) emerges as a promising solution for numerous military and civil applications. Transferring data collected from the environment to the ground station (GS) is a primary concern for meeting the communication demands of most of these applications. However, the highly mobile UAVs with limited communication range, resulting in frequent topology change and intermittent connectivity, make data routing challenging. In such scenarios, geographic routing is a viable solution due to its scalability and robustness. However, the basic forwarding mechanism of geographic routing favors the neighboring UAV nearest to the destination, impacted substantially by link failures and routing holes in a dynamic environment. Additionally, routing decisions ignoring the current load over UAVs contribute to performance degradation due to the high concentration of data traffic near the GS. Thus, to address these issues, a geographic routing protocol named MF‐DLB comprising multimetric forwarding (MF) and a directed acyclic graph‐based load balancing (DLB) scheme is proposed to enhance packet forwarding in FANETs. MF takes account of multiple metrics related to connectivity, geographic progress, link lifetime, and residual energy to select the next hop with a stable communication link while effectively bypassing the routing holes. The second scheme, DLB, focuses on proactively maintaining routing paths near GS for load distribution among underutilized nodes to address the congestion problem. Simulations performed in network simulator ns‐3 confirm the outperformance of MF‐DLB over other related routing schemes in terms of different performance metrics.