An Energy-Efficient Opportunistic Routing Protocol Based on Trajectory Prediction for FANETs

In recent years, with the emergence of UAVs(Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) in military and civil applications, the FANETs(Flying Ad-Hoc Networks) composed of multiple UAVs has attracted extensive attention from researchers. As a new type of airborne self-organizing network, the particularity in FANETs such as time-varying network topology and dynamic link makes it difficult to maintain continuous communication when performing tasks. Therefore, it is challenging to design a routing protocol for FANETs to guarantee the quality of data transmission and make communication more effective. In this article, we propose a new opportunistic routing protocol based on trajectory prediction, named EORB-TP. To be specific, we first predict the position of nodes in three-dimensional space and solve the problem of uncertainty of node contact in opportunistic communication. Secondly, we define the node’s trajectory metric value to measure the node’s trajectory characteristics and effectively avoid the excessive consumption of edge nodes. In addition, when choosing relay nodes, an energy-saving data forwarding strategy is designed to deal with the limited energy resources and storage space of UAVs. Simulation results show that compared with the state-of-the-art protocols, our protocol can increase the delivery rate by approximately 40% at best and can reduce the delay by approximately 80%.