Jamming-Resilient Multipath Routing Protocol for Flying Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

As a result of the rapid technological advances on electronic, sensors and communication technologies, and increasingly popular multi-sized unmanned aerial vehicles, also referred to as drones, flying ad hoc networks (FANETs) are rapidly proliferating and leading the emergence of Internet of Drones and its applications. Because of the versatility, flexibility, easy installation, and relatively small operating expenses of drones, FANETs have enormous potential in the public and civil domains. However, due to unique characteristics of FANETs, routing demands of FANETs go beyond the needs of mobile ad hoc networks and vehicular ad hoc networks. In this paper, we propose a jamming-resilient multipath routing protocol, also called JarmRout , so that intentional jamming and disruption or isolated and localized failures do not interrupt the overall network performance of FANETs. To achieve this goal, the JarmRout relies on a combination of three major schemes that are link quality scheme, traffic load scheme, and spatial distance scheme. We present a simple analytical model and its numerical result in terms of RREP packet reception rate of source node. We also evaluate the proposed routing protocol through extensive simulation experiments using the OMNeT++ and compare its performance with three representative routing protocols that are dynamic source routing, optimized link state routing, and split multipath routing. Simulation results show that the JarmRout can not only improve packet delivery ratio and packet delivery latency but also can reduce end-to-end communication outage rate without introducing extra communication overhead, indicating a viable approach to improve network resiliency in the presence of malicious jammers in FANETs.