Performance Evaluation of AODV and DSR Routing Protocols for Flying Ad hoc Network Using Highway Mobility Model

Abstract

The Flying Ad hoc Network (FANET) is a special type of mobile ad hoc network (MANET) that provides communications among Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). These UAVs can reduce human intervention to a great extent by giving numerous applications under different domains such as transportation, military, healthcare, traffic monitoring, surveillance, etc. In FANET, communication is relatively challenging due to its complex infrastructure, unspecified architecture and rapid mobility of nodes. The work embodied in this paper is focused on traffic surveillance of highways using UAVs. UAVs can help to reduce the number of accidents by sharing real-time as well as the accurate status of highways among vehicles and the control station. On the other hand, they can also be used to track specific vehicles on the road. In FANET, both routing protocols and mobility models play a crucial role in the process of information exchange. In this paper, the comparison and performance evaluation of two well-known reactive routing protocols viz. Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) and Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) have been carried out using highway mobility model for traffic surveillance in FANET environment. Implementation of both protocols has been tested on several traffic patterns, mobility and varying network loads. Both AODV and DSR enable significant performance variations; however, they share on-demand behavior. Packet delivery fraction, average end-to-end delay, normalized routing load, packet loss, routing overhead and throughput are used to analyze the performance of both protocols. Based on experimental analysis using NS-2 under constant bit rate (CBR) and TCP traffic sources, it can be stated that AODV outperforms DSR in almost every aspect.