Betweenness Centrality Based Dynamic Source Routing for Flying Ad Hoc Networks in Marching Formation

Designing high-performance routing protocols for flying ad hoc networks (FANETs) is challenging due to the diversity of applications and the dynamics of network topology. The existing general-purpose routing protocols for ad hoc networks often oversimplify mobility patterns and disregard the unequal importance of nodes, resulting in suboptimal routing decisions that are unsuitable for task-oriented FANETs. To break the bottleneck, in this paper we propose a betweenness centrality based dynamic source routing (BC-DSR) protocol for a flying ad hoc network (FANET) in marching formation. Firstly, we introduce a Gauss-Markov group (GMG) mobility model based on the leader-follower pattern, which accurately captures the temporal and spatial correlations of node movements in the realistic marching formation. Besides, we exploit the concept of BC defined in graph theory to measure the structural unequal importance of relay nodes, i.e., to determine link weights, in the particular marching formation topology. The path of least cost is calculated relying on a weighted directed graph constructed. The ns-3 based simulation results demonstrate that our BC-DSR protocol achieves higher packet-delivery ratio and lower average end-to-end latency and routing overhead ratio than representative benchmark protocols used in FANETs, while maintaining a reasonably small network jitter.