A survey of routing protocols for highly dynamic mobile ad hoc networks

The development and utilization of near space is making communication one of the most important design problems for flying nodes in it. Communication architecture based on infrastructure restricts the capability of the flying network systems. Ad Hoc networking among flying nodes named Flying Ad Hoc Network (FANET) can solve the problems raised from a fully infrastructure based network. However, because of the high mobility of the nodes, network segmentation, intermittent links, resource constraints and changes in QoS requirements, routing has become one of the most challenging issues for FANET. In this paper, we collected the existing protocols for FANET, and then introduced the main challenges of FANET routing protocol design. Open research issues were also discussed.