Enhancing the RGR Routing Protocol for Unmanned Aeronautical Ad-hoc Networks

The design of a routing protocol for Unmanned Aeronautical Ad-hoc Networks (UAANETs) is quite challenging, especially due to the high mobility of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and the low network density. Among all routing protocols that have been designed for UAANETs, the Reactive-Greedy-Reactive (RGR) protocol has been proposed as a promising routing protocol in high mobility and density-variable scenarios. While prior results have shown that RGR is competitive to AODV or other purely reactive routing protocols, it is not fully exploiting all the unique features of UAANETs and the knowledge maintained by intermediate nodes. This report presents a number of different enhancements, namely scoped flooding, delayed route request, and mobility prediction, in order to improve the performance of RGR in terms of overhead, packet delivery ratio and delay respectively. These modifications were implemented in Opnet, and simulation results show that we can reduce the protocol overhead by about 30%, while at the same time increasing PDR by about 3-5% and reducing packet latency. The results further show that there is still significant scope for further performance improvements.