LPAR: Link Stability Prediction-based Adaptive Routing Protocol for Flying Ad Hoc Networks

With increasing demands for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), also known as drones, in modern military affairs as well as civil fields, flying ad hoc networks (FANETs) play an essential role in coordinating drones. However, due to the high mobility of drones, these networks are very dynamic and suffer from routing path failure and packet loss. The existing mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) routing protocols are not enough to meet the requirements of high speed of drones and fail to provide reliable communications. In order to overcome this problem of conventional protocols, we propose a protocol named link stability prediction-based adaptive routing (LPAR) protocol. By predicting the location of drones, our protocol can set up a most stable connection in a certain period of time instead of one point. In addition, it uses the prediction error to adjust the control packet interval and reduce the network overhead. This novel routing protocol has been compared with other three protocols: AODV, RGR and LAOD. The protocol performance has been evaluated in terms of packet delivery ratio (PDR), normalized control overhead and average end-to-end delay.