Improving routing in networks of UAVs via scoped flooding and mobility prediction

Due to their specific characteristics, Unmanned Aeronautical Ad-hoc Networks (UAANETs) can be classified as a special kind of mobile ad-hoc networks. Due to the high mobility of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), designing a good routing protocol for UAANETs is challenging. Recently, a new protocol called Reactive-Greedy-Reactive (RGR) [1] has been proposed as a promising routing protocol in high mobility and density-variable scenarios. Although the RGR protocol improves the packet delivery ratio, the overhead and delay are higher when compared to AODV [1]. In this paper, a scoped flooding and mobility prediction based RGR protocol is proposed to improve the performance of RGR in UAANETs. Simulation results show that the new protocol can effectively enhance the performance of the RGR protocol in terms of packet delivery ratio, overhead, and delay