A Simple Proactive Routing Protocol with Multiple Base Stations Deployment for Unmanned Aerial Vehicular Networks

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or aerial drones have a very encouraging future owing to the flexibility of their use in plenty of applications and the provision of less costly solutions in comparison to fixed infrastructure networks. It is a very challenging design problem to realize a collaborating end-to-end routing solution for a UAV network, which is very prone to link failures due to its highly dynamic nature. In this paper, a simple Proactive Routing scheme with Multiple ground Base Stations deployment (PRMBS) is presented. In PRMBS, periodic messages called DNA for Drones and Network Association from the ground base stations side are broadcast and relayed into the whole network. There are no separate hello messages in PRMBS and the role of a hello message is played by DNA messages. The path for data traffic is formed in a reverse manner to reach the respective ground base station from which the DNA message was received. The proposed proactive scheme is simulated in Network-Simulator-2 and it shows very promising results for dynamic UAV networks.