A Comparative Study on Propagation Models for Routing Protocols in FANETs

Rapid growth of technology and sudden high demand of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has significantly influenced the design and development of efficient and robust UAV network architecture, propagation models, routing techniques, etc. Resultantly, in recent years, the usage of UAVs in forms of flying Ad Hoc Networks (FANETs), especially drone swarms, in disaster recovery, military applications, forest surveillance, critical missions, emergency services, etc. are becoming more popular and powerful. However, selection of propagation models in FANETs is always a challenge due to its wireless shared links, individual drone’s mobility, limited power, etc. Hence, in this paper, we study propagation models for performance comparison of routing protocols in FANETs. Specifically, we study and present simulation results of Lutz and ITU Recommendation series to compare Ad hoc On demand Distance Vector Routing (AODV) and Destination Sequenced Distance Vector Routing (DSDV), two widely used routing protocols in FANETs considering rain attenuation. Finally, a plot of the Cramer-Rao Lower Bound has also been presented in order to provide better clarity for depicting the performances of FANETs’ routing protocols.