Combined Reactive-Geographic Routing for Unmanned Aeronautical Ad-hoc Networks

As a result of high mobility of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), designing a good routing protocol is challenging for Unmanned Aeronautical Ad-hoc Networks (UAANETs). Geographic-based routing mechanisms are seen to be an interesting option for routing in UAANETs due to the fact that location information of UAVs is readily available. In this paper, a combined routing protocol, called the Reactive-Greedy-Reactive (RGR), is presented for UAANET applications, which combines the mechanisms of the Greedy Geographic Forwarding (GGF) and reactive routing. The proposed RGR employs location information of UAVs as well as reactive end-to-end paths in the routing process. Simulation results show that RGR outperforms existing protocols such as Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) in search UAANET missions in terms of delay and packet delivery ratio, yet its overhead is similar to traditional mechanisms.