Performance Evaluation of Ad Hoc Routing Protocols in (FANETs)

The utilization of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as aerial relays for the Internet of Drones (IoD) network has several advantages such as civilian and military applications. A Flying Ad-Hoc Network (FANETs) is a group of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) which can complete their function without human intervention. FANET is considered as a subset of MANET, however, due to high mobility and rapid topology changes in FANET applying routing protocols in FANET is a big challenge. In this paper, we have extensively evaluated existing Ad-Hoc routing protocols such as OLSR, AODV, DSR, TORA& GRP for FANET environment. The performance of those protocols was evaluated using an OPNET 17.5 network simulator. We have compared the protocols using packet dropped ratio, end to end delay, number of hops and throughput in different moving speeds and mobility models such as Random Waypoint Mobility (RWPM), Manhattan Grid Mobility Model (MGM), Semi-Random Circular Movement (SCRM) and Pursue Mobility Model (PRS). For all evaluation scenarios, the results indicate that OLSR and GRP perform better than AODV, DSR, and TORA on average. This paper shows that the variation of the network topology caused by the relative speed of nodes is the main reason for the fluctuation of network performance. Also, we found that the (MGM) greatly affects the packet dropped ratio for all protocols. As we increase mobility speed, we found that End-to-End delay decreases in MGM, PRS and RWPM, while it is high in SCRM.