Intensive study, tuning and modification of reactive routing approach to improve flat FANET performance in data collection scenario

The Flying Ad-hoc Network (FANET) can be defined as the Ad-hoc network that connects unmanned aerial vehicles flying in the space with each other and with a ground base station. However, the 3D movement of these drones with higher speeds results in a network of highly dynamic topology and intermittent connections, making the standard Ad Hoc routing protocols are not suitable for FANET. The approaches followed to address this issue include designing from scratch a routing protocol specific to FANET or modifying the existing protocols. From the view point of reliability, accuracy, and time, it is preferable to base the work on a protocol standard. But before amending the standard, tuning its performance and applying it under suitable conditions may be satisfactory for the new use. Therefore, this work considers flat FANET of fully mission-controlled drones and performs an extensive parametric simulation study to determine the best conditions and parameters' values for applying the popular Ad Hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) to it. After deducing the recommended operating environment (FAODVN-OE), some examples of amendments were suggested to further improve the performance. It was found that the modified FAODVN-OE achieves high performance compared to the default standard in terms of jitter and delay. It helped reduce jitter and delay by an average of 93.2% and 83.8%, respectively, while exhausting less energy; however the network experiences a 24.5% reduction in packet delivery ratio.