Flying ad hoc network (FANET) provides portable and flexible communication for many applications and possesses several unique design challenges; a key one is the successful delivery of messages to the destination, reliably. For reliable communication, routing plays an important role, which establishes a path between source and destination on the basis of certain criteria. Conventional routing protocols of FANET generally use a minimum hop count criterion to find the best route between source and destination, which results in lower latency with the consideration that there is single source/destination network environment. However, in a network with multiple sources, the minimum hop count routing criterion along with the 1-Hop HELLO messages broadcasted by each node in the network may deteriorate the network performance in terms of high End-to-End (ETE) delay and decrease in the lifetime of the network. This research work proposes a Reliable link-adaptive position-based routing protocol (RLPR) for FANET. It uses relative speed, signal strength, and energy of the nodes along with the geographic distance towards the destination using a forwarding angle. This angle is used to determine the forwarding zone that decreases the undesirable control messages in the network in order to discover the route. RLPR enhances the network performance by selecting those relay nodes which are in the forwarding zone and whose geographic movement is towards the destination. Additionally, RLPR selects the next hop with better energy level and uses signal strength and relative speed of the nodes to achieve high connectivity-level. Based on the performance evaluation performed in the Network simulator (ns-2.35), it has been analysed that RLPR outperforms the Robust and reliable predictive based routing (RARP) and Ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) protocols in different scenarios. The results show that RLPR achieves a 33% reduction in control messages overhead as compared to RARP and 45% reduction as compared to AODV. Additionally, RLPR shows a 55% improvement in the lifetime of the network as compared to RARP and 65% as compared to AODV. Moreover, the search success rate in RLPR is 16% better as compared to RARP and 28% as compared to AODV.

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