Opportunistic cooperative TDMA scheme for FANETs

Abstract

Practical and efficient routing protocols for networks of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have rapidly grown into a research hotspot in future advanced wireless communication. This paper studies a TDMA-based opportunistic cooperative relaying (OCR-TDMA) MAC scheme for Flying Ad-Hoc Networks (FANETs), which is applied in a two-hop relay network composed of source UAV, relaying UAV, destination UAV and helper UAVs. Here, helper UAVs are different with the default relaying UAV, and only help forwarding relay packets when certain conditions are met, which balances fairness and high efficiency. This paper proposes a method to calculate the throughput of OCR-TDMA. The theoretical analysis results and simulation results match well, and show attractive performance gain against CR-TDMA. Markablely, OCR-TDMA can perform well even in hostile communication environment, in which CR-TDMA is almost out of work.