Beam Aware Stochastic Multihop Routing for Flying Ad-hoc Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces BA-SMURF, a routing scheme for FANETs that accounts for UAV position uncertainty and beamforming, resulting in improved throughput over existing methods.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel SDN routing scheme that jointly considers positioning uncertainty and beamforming for more reliable UAV network routing.

Findings

5% throughput improvement over state-of-the-art methods

Joint beamforming and routing enhance network reliability

Accounts for UAV position uncertainty in routing decisions

Abstract

Routing is a crucial component in the design of Flying Ad-Hoc Networks (FANETs). State of the art routing solutions exploit the position of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and their mobility information to determine the existence of links between them, but this information is often unreliable, as the topology of FANETs can change quickly and unpredictably. In order to improve the tracking performance, the uncertainty introduced by imperfect measurements and tracking algorithms needs to be accounted for in the routing. Another important element to consider is beamforming, which can reduce interference, but requires accurate channel and position information to work. In this work, we present the Beam Aware Stochastic Multihop Routing for FANETs (BA-SMURF), a Software-Defined Networking (SDN) routing scheme that takes into account the positioning uncertainty and beamforming design to find the most reliable routes in a FANET. Our simulation results show that joint consideration of the beamforming and routing can provide a 5% throughput improvement with respect to the state of the art.