Customized novel routing metrics for wireless mesh-based swarm-of-drones applications

With the proliferation of drones, there is an increasing interest on utilizing swarm-of-drones in numerous applications from surveillance to search and rescue. While a swarm-of-drones (a.k.a flying ad hoc networks (FANETs)) is essentially a special form of mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) which has been studied for many years, there are unique requirements of drone applications that necessitate re-visiting MANET protocols. These challenges stem from 3-D environments the drones are deployed in, and their specific way of mobility which adds to the wireless link management challenges among the drones. To tackle these challenges, in this paper, we propose adopting the current mesh standard, namely IEEE 802.11s, in its routing capabilities to provide improved performance. Specifically, we propose two new link quality routing metrics called SrFTime and CRP as an alternative to the IEEE 802.11s default Airtime routing metric to meet network throughput requirements for FANET applications. Basically, SrFTime improves network performance of stationary FANETs, while CRP is designed to fit the transient link characteristics of mobile drones and enable more efficient routes from drones to their destinations. To be able to test these metrics, we also introduce a group mobility model adaptation for FANET’s needs. The evaluations in the actual 802.11s standard using ns-3 simulator and introduced 3-D mobility models indicate that our proposed metrics outperform the existing one consistently under various conditions.