Available Bandwidth Guided On-Demand Distance Vector Protocol for FANETs

Abstract

Video streaming in unmanned aerial vehicles helped in performing surveillance, inspection, and map generation tasks. However, packet loss in multi-drone networks frequently occurs due to the high mobility of the nodes and to congestion. In this article Available Bandwidth Guided On-Demand Distance Vector (ABODV) protocol for Flying Ad Hoc Networks (FANETs) is introduced, which has some enhancement over the traditional Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) protocol. In this protocol, the source node chooses the neighbors who has highest number of entries in their routing table, leading to reduction in the overhead. ABODV was implemented and tested using a special simulator environment. It was noticed that the adopted strategy of reducing the neighboring nodes in some cases had led to congestion. Therefore, to overcome congestion, the available bandwidth parameter was included for optimizing FANETs performance. This resulted in distributing the load in a balanced way. Existing available bandwidth estimation methods were investigated in terms of precision and speed. A FindPath tool for estimating the available bandwidth has been suggested, implemented, and evaluated. The customized protocol seemed to give satisfactory results for applications using FANETs.

Keywords

• fanet
• uav
• routing protocol
• aodv
• bandwidth