Trajectory-aware Ad hoc Routing Protocol for Micro Aerial Vehicle Networks

Abstract

Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) are small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that are generally equipped with camera, GPS and other sensors and are envisioned for many civil and commercial applications. Some of these applications require transmitting multimedia traffic and demand for a high wireless network throughput. In this paper, we consider an application scenario where a team of MAVs cover multiple areas of interest; e.g., during sports events, following known trajectories (mobility paths) and transmitting continuous streams of sensed traffic (images or video) to a ground station. We propose a Route Switching (RS) algorithm that utilizes both the location and the trajectory information of the MAVs to schedule and update routes to seamlessly transmit traffic to the destination. Simulation results show improved network performance in terms of throughput in comparison to Ad-hoc On demand Distance Vector (AODV) and Location Aided Routing (LAR) since the proposed algorithm exploits the added path information for route discovery.