Dynamic Routing for Flying Ad Hoc Networks

摘要

This paper reports experimental results on self-organizing wireless networkscarried by small flying robots. Flying ad hoc networks (FANETs) composed ofsmall unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are flexible, inexpensive and fast todeploy. This makes them a very attractive technology for many civilian andmilitary applications. Due to the high mobility of the nodes, maintaining acommunication link between the UAVs is a challenging task. The topology ofthese networks is more dynamic than that of typical mobile ad hoc networks(MANETs) and of typical vehicle ad hoc networks (VANETs). As a consequence, theexisting routing protocols designed for MANETs partly fail in tracking networktopology changes. In this work, we compare two different routing algorithms forad hoc networks: optimized link-state routing (OLSR), and predictive-OLSR(P-OLSR). The latter is an OLSR extension that we designed for FANETs; it takesadvantage of the GPS information available on board. To the best of ourknowledge, P-OLSR is currently the only FANET-specific routing technique thathas an available Linux implementation. We present results obtained by bothMedia Access Control (MAC) layer emulations and real-world experiments. In theexperiments, we used a testbed composed of two autonomous fixed-wing UAVs and anode on the ground. Our experiments evaluate the link performance and thecommunication range, as well as the routing performance. Our emulation andexperimental results show that P-OLSR significantly outperforms OLSR in routingin the presence of frequent network topology changes.