Enhanced routing protocol for fast flying UAV network

Flying UAV network has tremendous potential for civilian and military applications. This paper is concerned with the design of a routing protocol for fast flying UAV network where UAVs are flying fastly and randomly in the sky. Due to the high mobility degree of UAVs, there may not exist instantaneous end-to-end communication path; thus, it is particularly challenging to design an available routing protocol with low transmission delay. The contribution of this paper is that we propose a Fountain-code based Greedy Queue and Position Assisted routing protocol, called FGQPA. It designs a Power Allocation and Routing (PAR) policy to relief the effect of the queue backlog on the overall network delay and employs a “nearest span” scheme to direct packets to the destination with a small delay. Our experimental results show that the proposed FGQPA can achieve lower transmission delay than the state-of-the-art disruption tolerant network routing protocol.