A Method to Reduce Route Discovery Cost of UAV Ad Hoc Network

Abstract

The unmanned aerial vehicle communication networks (UAVCNs) are composed of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) connected in ad hoc mode to facilitate vertical communication in 5G and beyond networks. UAVs operating in an ad hoc mode of operation mostly use reactive routing protocols to establish routes in the network to reduce the energy consumption of the nodes. In this article, a route discovery method is presented to reduce the overhead faced by reactive routing protocols during the route discovery phase. The expanding ring search (ERS) method is mostly used by reactive routing protocols in the destination discovery phase of the routing algorithm. Although the performance of the ERS method is better than simple flooding, the presented method further reduces energy consumption and routing overhead as compared to the conventional ERS method. To achieve the task, the time to live (TTL) is modified to accommodate a large number of nodes in a search attempt. We proposed variants of the proposed techniques for diverse application requirements and compared the performance with the state-of-the-art ERS technique. It has been demonstrated with the help of simulations that the presented algorithm outperforms the ERS method in terms of reduced routing overhead and reduced energy consumption.