Stateless and predictive geographic multicast scheme in flying Ad-hoc networks

Abstract

Flying Ad-hoc Networks (FANETs), which is a subset of Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs), are wireless ad-hoc networks specifically designed for the communication of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Multicast routing is one of the vital aspects in wireless ad-hoc networks. Existing research works have discussed solutions to tackle the challenges in multicast routing in ad-hoc network environments with multi-hop communication. Nevertheless, the conventional mechanisms incur excessive control messages overhead when a large number of nodes experience frequent topological changes. For a large number of nodes, a scalable and stateless geographic multicast routing mechanism, which specially require localized operation, and reduced computation and storage, are necessary. So we are interested in devising geographic multicast routing solutions in FANETs with multi-hop communication. Multicast routing in FANETs is extremely challenging because of the unique behavior of the network like frequent mobility of nodes, dynamic topology changes and network disconnection. In this paper, we propose a novel stateless and predictive geographic multicast routing mechanism in FANETs called SP_GMRF. Unlike the existing geographic multicast schemes in wireless networks, SP-GMRF operates reactively and predicts the positions of the neighbor nodes before selecting the forwarding neighbor relay nodes that progress to the multicast destinations. Using Matlab simulator, the performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated. The evaluation result has shown that when the network size (the number of nodes) and the transmission range of the multicast source increases, the existence of predicted one-hop forwarders nearest to multicast destinations also increases.