A traffic-differentiated routing algorithm in Flying Ad Hoc Sensor Networks with SDN cluster controllers

Abstract

Recently, Flying Ad-hoc Sensor Networks (FASNETs), which are basically ad hoc networks between Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), have been playing a great role in many sensing fields. To further improve the utilization of network resources, researchers offer the possibility of applying Software Defined Networking (SDN) technology to FASNETs, enabling various applications to be supported over the same platform. Since these concurrently executed applications might have diverse Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, it brings new challenges to network management and resource scheduling. In this paper, we propose a novel clustering FASNET architecture with SDN cluster controllers and also a collaborative controller, in order to realize hierarchical management and unified dispatch. Based on our designed architecture, we also propose a centralized traffic-differentiated routing (TDR) executed in each cluster, which aims to guarantee the specific QoS requirements of delay-sensitive and reliability-requisite services. Different weights are assigned to various flows according to their sensitivity to delay and also levels of importance. In particular, we introduce a transmission reliability prediction model to TDR, in which we consider both link availability and node’s forwarding ability. Simulation results show our proposed TDR has good performances in terms of end-to-end delay, packet dropping ratio and network throughput.