An Enhanced ACO Routing Protocol for Flying Ad Hoc Network

In the modern world, technology is essential to human survival. The rapid growth in the number of UAVs in recent decades, as well as their discovery through enormous prospective, has altered and shift the usage of re-searchers and users. UAVs can be utilized to effectively accomplish complicated jobs when arranged as an ad hoc network, leading to the well-known flying ad hoc networks (FANETs). FANET is a communication technology that enables communication between flying nodes that are in motion in the sky. The dynamic characteristics of FANETs, such as high node mobility, bandwidth limitations, frequent route failure, and dynamic topology, as well as disconnections and high overhead that lower protocol performance, diminish routing efficiency. This study proposes the Hybrid Ant Colony Optimization Routing Protocol (HACORP) to improve the shortest path routing procedure's execution. The shortest path of the proposed protocol has the lowest communication costs and the fewest hops between the starting and ending flying nodes. There are two parts to HACORP. The HACORP uses a distance computation tool to calculate the distance between flying nodes in step I. Step II instructs the ants to create a shorter data transmission line with the fewest number of hops by using origination-based ant colony optimization. In every aspect, the shortest approach improves protocol performance.