Opportunistic Routing with Available Bandwidth Assurance for High Dynamic UAV Swarms

The reconstruction of routing schemes constitutes an important quality of service (QoS) support for UAV swarms to keep their applications and services stable and active. In this paper, we develop a forwarding distance and available bandwidth (AB) estimation based opportunistic routing (FD-ABOR) protocol for high dynamic UAV swarms. We first improve the AB estimation algorithm for multi-hop UAV ad hoc networks by taking full account of the disparity between the sending and receiving ability and reconsidering the bandwidth consumption induced by hidden nodes. Secondly, we propose the scheme that the sender broadcast the RTS frame piggybacked with available bandwidth information for route request. Based on available bandwidth and forwarding distance, neighbour node decides it to be the candidate forwarder and computes the forwarding priority, then competes with each other to forward data packets. The simulation results show that our method outperforms AODV and DSR in terms of throughput and packet delivery ratio.