Towards Enhancement of Network Communication Architectures and Routing Protocols for FANETs: A Survey

Abstract

The popularity of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, has been growing rapidly in the recent years. Their applications extend to using a group of UAVs, forming what is known as the Flying Ad hoc Network (FANET), to perform a certain mission in various applications such as search and rescue and various military applications and many others. In order for the UAVs to communicate, a network communication architecture with the implementation of suitable routing protocols needs to be established while taking into consideration the limitation of this system. Therefore, in this paper, we survey in details the latest state-of-the-art network communication architectures and various ad-hoc routing protocols, mainly those falling under the proactive, reactive and hybrid routing protocols and their enhanced versions which are used currently for FANETs. Furthermore, we propose a unique network communication architecture based on the concept of clustering with the aim of overcoming the limitation in the state-of-theart. Moreover, we put forward a new idea of a routing mechanism to aid in implementing an efficient and effective routing system for FANETs.