A Multichannel MAC Protocol without Coordination or Prior Information for Directional Flying Ad hoc Networks

Abstract

Achieving neighbor discovery for a directional flying ad hoc network (FANET) with multiple channels poses challenges for media access control (MAC) protocol design, as it requires simultaneous main lobe and channel rendezvous while dealing with the high UAV mobility. In order to achieve fast neighbor discovery for initial access without coordination or prior information, we first establish the theoretical supremum for the directional main lobe. Then, to achieve the supremum, we introduce the BR-DA and BR-DA-FANET algorithms to respectively establish the supremum on rendezvous between a pair of UAVs’ main lobes and rendezvous of main lobes for all UAVs in the FANET. To further accelerate the neighbor discovery process, we propose the neighbor discovery with location prediction protocol (ND-LP) and the avoiding communication interruption with location prediction (ACI-LP) protocol. ND-LP enables quick main lobe rendezvous and channel rendezvous, while ACI-LP enables beam tracking and channel rendezvous together with the avoidance of communication interruptions. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed protocols outperform the state-of-the-art works in terms of neighbor discovery delay.