Topology-Based Routing Protocols and Mobility Models for Flying Ad Hoc Networks: A Contemporary Review and Future Research Directions

Abstract

Telecommunications among unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have emerged recently due to rapid improvements in wireless technology, low-cost equipment, advancement in networking communication techniques, and demand from various industries that seek to leverage aerial data to improve their business and operations. As such, UAVs have started to become extremely prevalent for a variety of civilian, commercial, and military uses over the past few years. UAVs form a flying ad hoc network (FANET) as they communicate and collaborate wirelessly. FANETs may be utilized to quickly complete complex operations. FANETs are frequently deployed in three dimensions, with a mobility model determined by the work they are to do, and hence differ between vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) and mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) in terms of features and attributes. Furthermore, different flight constraints and the high dynamic topology of FANETs make the design of routing protocols difficult. This paper presents a comprehensive review covering the UAV network, the several communication links, the routing protocols, the mobility models, the important research issues, and simulation software dedicated to FANETs. A topology-based routing protocol specialized to FANETs is discussed in-depth, with detailed categorization, descriptions, and qualitatively compared analyses. In addition, the paper demonstrates open research topics and future challenge issues that need to be resolved by the researchers, before UAVs communications are expected to become a reality and practical in the industry.

Cluster-Based Routing Protocols for Flying Ad Hoc Networks (FANETs)

“…There are various clusters where the UAV collects data while flying above the CH. Figure (10) illustrates the delay calculation. In ERSUAV, the overall delay of an unmanned aerial vehicle is defined in Equation (11):…”

“…and ease of construction [7], [8]. Multi-UAV cooperation, which is an essential part of this project, could lead to a wide range of uses, including precise geographic localization [9], search and rescue missions [10], intelligent transportation systems [11], target detection [12], disaster tracking and monitoring [13], volcano monitoring [14], delivering medical supplies to otherwise inaccessible regions [15], border patrol missions [16], prevention and control of forest fires [17], UAV control by the brain [18], acting as relays for Internet distribution [19], among others Drones are also extensively employed in the military [20]; for example, the US Navy's LOCUST project hires a swarm of autonomous drones to carry out coordinated military operations [21]. Numerous additional applications are being developed in academia and industry in addition to these marketed ones [22].…”

UAV Communication Network Modeling and Energy Consumption Optimization Based on Routing Algorithm

“…In the process of network topology construction, the main security threats faced by UAV self-assembled networks include tampering attacks and impersonation attacks. If the integrity of topology construction messages is compromised, it will lead to wrong data being used for network topology construction, forming an invalid or inefficient topology structure [11][12][13]. The existing work on security protection of UAV selfassembling network mainly focuses on identity legitimacy verification, message confidentiality protection, message integrity protection, malicious node detection, and other areas when messages are transmitted between nodes after the network topology is established and lacks message Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine security protection mechanisms for the process of network topology establishment, and the existing few security protection schemes for topology messages are applicable to the UAV self-assembling network with flat network structure and cannot be directly applied to the hierarchical network.…”

Swarm of UAVs for Network Management in 6G: A Technical Review

“…UAVs are one of these vital applications, which is expected to be a hot research area in the coming decades. AI, DL, and ML techniques are being applied to different aspects for the UAVs, which have shown prominent improvements in efficiency, resilience, and robustness [94].…”