Enhancing Routing Protocol Resilience for Dynamic UAV Networks in Frequency-Sweeping Jamming Environments

We consider flying ad hoc networks (FANETs) operating in frequency-sweeping jamming environment, where jamming significantly impairs the performance of routing protocols, leading to unstable network communications and data loss. Currently, jamming is defended at physical and link layer by military radio stations, which focuses on restoring communication of a single link. Existing routing protocols fail to utilize valuable information from these radio stations effectively to restore a multi-hop path. To address this issue, we propose a novel routing protocol optimization method that combines spectrum awareness techniques to further mitigate the adverse effects of jammers on overall network performance. The proposed method utilizes the obtained jammer information and bit error rate to modify various parameters in the routing protocol, enabling it to adapt to jamming scenarios. We implement the optimized protocol on the EXata simulation platform. The simulation results show that, compared with the reference protocols, the proposed protocol can increase the throughput by up to 12% and improve the packet delivery ratio by up to 14% in the presence of frequency-sweeping jammers.