Quality of Service Aware Routing Protocol for Flying Adhoc Networks

Abstract

Adhoc networks have been a curious research domain since their inception with the initial adhoc network research focusing on effective routing of data among the nodes. As the adhoc networks do not have any infrastructural device for centralized management and operations, each adhoc node has to fulfil the functionality of an administering node like a router and an end node itself. This setup resulted in the evolution of mobile adhoc networks in which multiple autonomous mobile nodes communicate and exchange data among each other using adhoc routing protocols to fulfil a specific task. With the evolution of UAVs, the mobile adhoc networks got extended into the flying adhoc networks in which multiple autonomously flying nodes communicate with each other independently exchanging data to fulfil the functionality of multiple applications. The primary issue with flying adhoc networks is handling the dynamicity of autonomously flying nodes to effectively exchange data among them. Due the frequent topology changes, varying node speeds, and varying node density, the flying adhoc network exhibit link breakages resulting in packet loss impacting throughput of the network. Also the route recovery process takes time to identify alternative route for packet delivery among nodes. This results in increased end to end delay for packet deliveries. To address these challenges , an efficient Quality of Service Aware Routing Protocol has been proposed for flying adhoc networks. The protocol takes into consideration the dynamic characteristics of flying adhoc networks to formulate a routing mechanism which can effectively route data among the flying nodes. The proposed QARP protocol focuses on identifying the most optimal nodes for forwarding the data to the destination and minimizing the delay in the data delivery. To fulfil these objectives, the proposed QARP adopts the heuristics of nature inspired firefly algorithm to perform the route discovery in which the neighbour nodes with least delay towards the destination are identified for each node in the network. Then the heuristic of gaussian quantum particle swarm optimization algorithm is used to identify the least delay packet forwarding nodes for data delivery to the destination. The usage of this hybrid approach resulted in achieving efficiency and optimization in terms of packet delivery ratio, delay, throughput, routing overhead, and energy efficiency for delivering packets when compared with other routing protocols like MDRMA, MA-DP-AODV, and MDA-AODV. The comparative analysis has been carried out through the simulation using NS-2.35 simulator. The evaluation of the protocols has been done in three different scenarios of varying node density, varying number of connections, and varying packet transmission rate. In all the three scenarios, the proposed routing protocol performed better in comparison to its counter parts with respect to different performance evaluation parameters. The comparative analysis of the proposed protocol clearly showed its effectiveness in the efficient delivery of data among the flying nodes by reducing the delay, minimizing routing overhead, improving the packet delivery ratio, and increasing the throughput.