ASR-FANET: An adaptive SDN-based routing framework for FANET

Abstract

Flying ad hoc network (FANET) is widely used in many military, commercial and civilian applications. Compared with mobile adhoc network (MANET) and vehicular ad hoc network (VANET), FANET holds unique characteristics such as high mobility, intermittent links and frequent topology changes, which cause a challenging task in the design of routing protocols. A novel adaptive software defined networking (SDN)-based routing framework for FANET called ASR-FANET is proposed in this article to solve the above challenges. The ASR-FANET framework is mainly composed of three important parts, which are the topology discovery mechanism, statistics gathering mechanism and route computation mechanism. In topology discovery mechanism, the periodic information about network topology is collected, including nodes and links. In statistics gathering mechanism, the status of the wireless network connection and flight statistics are collected. In route computation mechanism, the optimal path is calculated based on link costs. The performance of ASR-FANET framework is also has been evaluated by comprehensive simulations. The simulation results show that proposed framework is much better than other traditional protocols in packet delivery fraction, average end to end delay, normalized routing load, packet loss and throughput.