Intelligent hello dissemination model for FANET routing protocols

Abstract

The routing mechanisms in flying ad-hoc networks (FANETs) using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been a challenging issue for many reasons, such as its high speed and different directions of use. In FANETs, the routing protocols send hello messages periodically for the maintenance of routes. However, the hello messages that are sent in the network increase the bandwidth wastage on some occasions and the excessive number of hello messages can also cause the problem of energy loss. Scarce works deal with the problem of excessive hello messages in dynamic UAVs scenarios, and treat several other problems, such as bandwidth and energy wastage simultaneously. Generally, the existing solutions configure the hello interval to an excessive long or short time period originating delay in neighbors discovery. Thus, a self-acting approach is necessary for calculating the exact number of hello messages with the aim to reduce the bandwidth wastage of the network and the energy loss; this approach needs to be low complex in terms of computational resource consumption. In order to solve this problem, an intelligent Hello dissemination model, AI-Hello, based on reinforcement learning algorithms, that adapts the hello message interval scheme is proposed to produce a dense reward structure, and facilitating the network learning. Experimental results, considering FANET dynamic scenarios of high speed range with 40 UAVs, show that the proposed method implemented in two widely adopted routing protocols (AODV and OLSR) saved 30.86% and 27.57% of the energy consumption in comparison to the original AODV and OLSR protocols, respectively. Furthermore, our proposal reached better network performance results in relation to the state-of-the-art methods that are implemented in the same protocols, considering parameters, such as routing overhead, packet delivery ratio, throughput and delay.