A Novel Multimodal Collaborative Drone-Assisted VANET Networking Model

Drones can be used for many assistance roles in complex communication scenarios and play as the aerial relays to support terrestrial communications. Although a great deal of emphasis has been placed on the drone-assisted networks, existing work focuses on routing protocols without fully exploiting the drones superiority and flexibility. To fill this gap, this paper proposes a collaborative communication scheme for multiple drones to assist the urban vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs). In this scheme, drones are distributed regarding the predicted terrestrial traffic condition in order to efficiently alleviate the inevitable problems of conventional VANETs, such as building obstacle, isolated vehicles, and uneven traffic loading. To effectively coordinate multiple drones, this issue is modeled as a multimodal optimization problem to improve the global performance on a certain space. To this end, a succinct swarm-based optimization algorithm, namely Multimodal Nomad Algorithm (MNA) is presented. This algorithm is inspired by the migratory behavior of the nomadic tribes on Mongolia grassland. Based on the floating car data of Chengdu China, extensive experiments are conducted to examine the performance of the MNA-optimized drone-assisted VANET. The results demonstrate that our scheme outperforms its counterparts in terms of hop number, packet delivery ratio, and throughput.