Intelligent Wireless Ad Hoc Routing Protocol and Controller for UAV Networks

1. Intelligent Wireless Ad Hoc Routing Protocol and Controller for UAV Networks Abhinandan Ramaprasath, Anand Srinivasan, Chung-Horng Lung, and Marc St-Hilair

2. Motivation

3. Problems - UAV-UAV communication • Find optimal routes to reach the destinations • Use multiple disjoint routes simultaneously in order to improve throughput • Prioritize packets and send them through the network on the shortest path • Integrate support for priority packets in lower network layers

4. Problems - UAV - User communication • Roaming between APs without losing connectivity • Load balancing traffic as evenly as possible across the network

5. Objectives • Create an approach able to address all the important features that are encountered in disaster scenarios: • Redundancy • Packet prioritization • Optimal throughput • Improve the UAV to user connectivity

6. Proposed Approach • Two communication devices in each UAV • UAV-UAV communication • UAV-User Communication • The deployment of the UAVs are predefined • The Sink contains the controller • The controller receives the link quality

7. Proposed Approach

8. Priority Levels • Priority control packets: packets with the highest priority • Non-priority control packets: control packets sent to the controller at regular intervals (every 30 s for example). • Priority data packets: Priority data packets. • Non-priority data packets: Non-priority data packets.

9. Network Setup and Discovery

10. UAV-UAV Communication • The control messages initially use AODV • Once a packet is queued at a UAV, an RTS packet is generated • According to the priority level of the packet • It waits for a CTS packet with a certain timeout • If the timeout is exceeded • The RTS/CTS communication is restarted using the alternate route • A UAV marked as lost • The routes are periodically updated.

11. Performance Evaluation • Performed using Ns-3 simulator • Comparison: OLSRv2, AODV • Nº of UAVs: 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 100, 500, 100 • UAV-UAV communication frequency: 1000MHz • Adaptive modulation

12. 1 - Experiment setup

15. 2 - Experiment setup

17. Priority Packets

18. Conclusion • The proposed UAV-UAV communication is scalable, efficient provides and supports packets with different priority levels • The routes communicated by the controller provide a means to distribute traffic throughout the network evenly, increasing the global efficiency of the network • The simulation results showed improved throughput and reduced latency for critical packets