Adaptive Coding Enables Fast and Light-weight Path Recovery in Topology-dynamic FANETs

Thanks to the flexible cooperation and maneuverability, Flying Ad-hoc Networks (FANETs) provide an efficient and economical solution for many military and civil applications. For measurement and optimization of networks, packet-level path recovery is desired to infer the complete transmission paths of each received packet. However, the existing technologies can hardly recover paths timely in FANETs with numerous mobile devices, due to the frequent change of topology and transmission paths. Besides, the massive overhead of recovery is unaffordable for the resource-constrained FAENTs. In this paper, we propose a Fast and Light-weight path recovery (FLY) for FAENTs to accurately infer the dynamic paths of each packet by less cost of time and overhead. It utilizes a modified form of network coding to guarantee the correct recovery after the collection of same-path packets. An adaptive size of coding is also presented to balance the overhead and comprehensive latency of path recovery. Compared with the state-of-art work, simulation results show that our proposal achieve better accuracy, overhead, and latency of path recovery in various FANET scenarios.