A Multi-Dimensional Decision Based Routing Scheme For Distributed Traffic Offloading in Flying Ad-hoc Networks

Over the past decade, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have experienced substantial growth across a wide range of applications, driving the need for efficient routing solutions in Flying Ad-hoc Networks (FANETs). However, it is challenging to design an effective routing scheme for FANETs due to their highly dynamic topology, large node mobility, and constrained resources. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a multi-dimensional decision based routing scheme (MDRS) in FANET, consisting of route discovery and route maintenance. Firstly, MDRS optimizes the route discovery mechanism of AODV that enables the storage of multiple candidate routes. Additionally, it incorporates four decision variables to compute route weights, allowing nodes to dynamically select the optimal route for data transmission. Secondly, route maintenance is introduced in MDRS, enabling nodes to promptly detect faulty nodes or routes. Upon identifying failures, route repair is initiated autonomously, minimizing disruption to data transmission. Finally, a comparison and analysis of the MDRS and AODV protocols in terms of link quality, energy efficiency, delay, and routing simplicity are presented. Simulation results demonstrate that MDRS outperforms AODV in link reliability and energy efficiency but incurs slightly higher delay and complexity due to its stability-first strategy.