OPAR: Optimized Predictive and Adaptive Routing for Cooperative UAV Networks

TL;DR

OPAR is a novel routing protocol for cooperative UAV networks that uses predictive modeling and linear programming to optimize path selection, significantly improving delivery success, throughput, and reducing delays compared to traditional protocols.

Contribution

This paper introduces OPAR, a new adaptive routing protocol for UAV networks that combines link lifetime prediction with linear programming for optimized path selection.

Findings

Increases successful delivery by over 30%.

Improves throughput by 25% on average.

Reduces flow completion time by 35%.

Abstract

Cooperative UAV networks are becoming increasingly popular in military and civilian applications. Alas, the typical ad-hoc routing protocols, which aim at finding the shortest path, lead to significant performance degradation because of the 3-dimension highly-dynamic nature of UAV networks and the uneven distribution of nodes across the network. This paper proposes OPAR, an optimized predictive and adaptive routing protocol, to face this challenging problem. We model the routing problem with linear programming (LP), where the goal is to maximize network performance, considering the path lifetime and path-length together. This model relies on a precise link lifetime prediction mechanism. We support the LP problem with a lightweight algorithm to find the optimized solution with a computation complexity of $O(|E|^2)$, where $|E|$ is the number of network links. We evaluate the OPAR performance and compare it with the well-known routing algorithms AODV, DSDV, and OLSR to cover a wide range of proactive and reactive protocols as well as distance vector and link-state techniques. We performed extensive simulations for different network densities and mobility patterns using the ns-3 simulator. Results show that OPAR prevents a high volume of routing traffic, increases the successful delivery by more than $30\%$, improves the throughput $25\%$ on average, and decreases the flow completion time by an average of $35\%$.