IoDMix: A novel routing protocol for Delay-Tolerant Internet of Drones integration in Intelligent Transportation System

Abstract

The Internet of Drones (IoD) aims to organize and control airspace to allow multiple drones to fly at the same time in a fair and organized way. Thus, applications such as drone delivery of goods are expected to work in urban environments safely. As a result, the airspace will have constant drone traffic, and the IoD will have its density linked to factors such as the day of the week and the time of day. Hence, the IoD is expected to present dense and sparse scenarios. In the case of sparse scenarios, drones may have difficulty communicating with each other and with the control station. Therefore, this work proposes a store–carry–forward protocol for Delay-Tolerant IoD, called IoDMix. Specifically, we use a multi-vehicle scenario to fill the communication gaps in IoD and integrate it into Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). In the urban scenario, it is expected the collaboration of distinct networks to improve their metrics. In this work, we consider a partnership between IoD, vehicular networks, public transport networks, and bicycle networks to form a heterogeneous network in situations where the IoD needs to be Delay-Tolerant (DTIoD). Our results show that the IoDMix protocol has a higher delivery rate when compared to a baseline protocol. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work considering a routing protocol that uses multi-vehicle to fill IoD communication gaps.