A Hierarchical Routing Protocol Based on AODV for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Swarm Network

With the development of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), UAV swarm network is becoming more and more popular for broad application. Compared with a single UAV to perform tasks, the UAV swarm network is the future significant trend. However, the expansion of the network scale will bring broadcast storms to the UAV swarm Ad Hoc network, resulting in the drop of packet delivery ratio. Therefore, this paper proposed a hierarchical routing protocol weighted-based clustering AODV (WBC-AODV) based on the clustering structure. Under this routing protocol, the cluster head node can effectively manage the routing establishment of member nodes, which can reduce the repeated forwarding of control data packets in the process of flood routing, and reduce the probability of data packet collision. The experimental results show that the proposed method can improve the packet delivery ratio of the network, but at the same time it will increase the average end-to-end delay of the network.