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In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have gained popularity for various applications and services in both the military and civilian domains. Multiple UAVs can carry out complex tasks efficiently when they are organized as an ad hoc network, where wireless communication is essential for cooperation and collaboration between UAVs and the ground station. Due to rapid mobility and highly dynamic topology, designing a routing protocol for UAV networks is a challenging task. As the number of UAVs increases, a hierarchical routing called clustering is necessarily required to provide scalability because clustering schemes ensure the basic level of system performance such as throughput, end-to-end delay, and energy efficiency. For approximately a half-decade, several survey articles have been reported on topologybased routing and position-based routing for UAV networks. To the best of the authors' knowledge, however, there is no survey on cluster-based routing in the literature. In this paper, cluster-based routing protocols for UAV networks are extensively surveyed and qualitatively compared in terms of outstanding features, characteristics, competitive advantages, and limitations. Furthermore, open research issues and challenges on cluster-based routing are discussed.INDEX TERMS Unmanned aerial vehicle, drone, unmanned aerial vehicle network, flying ad hoc network, routing protocol, clustering algorithm, scalability.In this study, cluster-based routing protocols for UAV networks are extensively surveyed and qualitatively compared in terms of outstanding features, characteristics, competitive advantages, and limitations. The main contributions of this study are as follows:• A comprehensive and state-of-the-art survey on clusterbased routing protocols for UAV networks is provided.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have gained popularity for diverse applications and services in both the military and civilian domains. For cooperation and collaboration among UAVs, they can be wirelessly interconnected in an ad hoc manner, resulting in a UAV network. UAV networks have unique features and characteristics that are different from mobile ad hoc networks and vehicular ad hoc networks. The dynamic behavior of rapid mobility and topology changes in UAV networks makes the design of a routing protocol quite challenging. In this paper, we review the routing protocols for UAV networks, in which the topology-based, position-based, hierarchical, deterministic, stochastic, and social-network-based routing protocols are extensively surveyed. The routing protocols are then compared qualitatively in terms of their major features, characteristics, and performance. Open issues and research challenges are also discussed in the perspective of design and implementation.INDEX TERMS Unmanned aerial vehicle network, flying ad hoc network, drone ad hoc network, routing protocol, rapid mobility, dynamic topology, scalability.

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