Abstract
The ever-increasing demand for flexible and portable communications has led to a rapid evolution in networking between unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) often referred to as flying ad-hoc networks (FANETs). However, due to the exclusive characteristics of UAVs such as high mobility, frequent topology change and 3D space movement, make routing a challenging task in FANETs. Due to these characteristics, designing new routing protocols for FANETs is quite difficult. In the literature study of FANETs, a variety of traditional ad-hoc networking protocols have been suggested and tested for FANETs to establish an efficient and robust communication among the UAVs. In this context, topology-based routing is considered the most significant approach for solving the routing issues in FANETs. Therefore, in this article we specifically focus on topology-based routing protocols with the aim of improving the efficiency of the network in terms of throughput, end-to-end delay, and network load. We present a brief review of the most important topology-based routing protocols in the context of FANETs. We provide them with their working features for exchanging information, along with the pros and cons of each protocol. Moreover, simulation analyses of some of the topology-based routing protocols are also evaluated in terms of end-to-end delay, throughput and network load the using optimized network engineering tools (OPNET) simulator. Furthermore, this work can be used as a source of reference for researchers and network engineers who seek literature that is relevant to routing in FANETs.
Highlights
During the past few years, the exponential progress in the making of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has helped create the foundation of a new kind of network, referred to as flying ad-hoc networks (FANETs)
When comparing the throughput by each of these protocols, Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) had high throughput when the number of UAVs was lower (i.e., 30) in both cases, when the speed of the UAVs was 25 m/s and 60 m/s as shown in Figure 4a,b respectively. This is due to their reactive nature, which renders DSR more suitable for FANETs in a highly mobile network, and due to the use of a route cache and overhearing features
FANETs have evolved into an emerging area of research
Summary
During the past few years, the exponential progress in the making of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has helped create the foundation of a new kind of network, referred to as flying ad-hoc networks (FANETs) Due to their versatility, adaptability, and easy deployment, FANETs are becoming a promising solution for various military and civilian applications, such as disaster inspection [1], search and rescue operations [2], border surveillance [3], forest fire detection [4], relaying networks [5,6], wind estimation [7], civil security [8], agricultural purposes [9], and traffic monitoring [10]. If some of the UAVs are disconnected during the mission due to weather conditions, they still have
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