Research On Posinition Information Assisted On-Demand Routing Protocol In UAVG-TNA

The background of the work presented in this thesis is the project of "Research on the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Group Tactic Network Architecture (UAVG-TNA)", undertaken by Sichuan Network Communication Technology Key Laboratory SC-Netcom Lab). As a result of this project, a novel network architecture, called DRNA (Dynamically Re-definable Network Architecture) was developed as an architecture for UAVG in the vision of Global Dynamically-reconfigurable Strategic Network (GDSN) for wartime military operation.UAVG-TN is a special type of MANET (Mobile Ad hoc Network), which differs from traditional ones by its high-speed node-movement and hostile operation environment. Therefore, it is vital for UAVG to be able to survive in a military operation. Routing strategy plays an important role in UAVG-TN operation considering communication resources are precious for small UAVs. This is exactly the reason for this dissertation to be directed to routing algorithms.This thesis presented a hierarchical architecture for UAVG-TN operation where a few UAVs equipped with better communication capability and Global Positioning System (GPS) form a Virtual Backbone Networks (VBN) to interconnect local UAVGs. UAVs in Local UAVG networks with limited communication facilities are capable of communicate with each other but needs assistance from VBN nodes for cross domain communication.DSR (Dynamic Source Routing) is a popular on-demand protocol designed to restrict the transmission capability consumed by control packets in MANETs by eliminating the periodic table-update messages required in the table-driven approach. The basic approach of this protocol during the route construction phase is to establish a route by flooding RouteRequest packets in the network. The destination node, on receiving a RouteRequest packet, responds by sending a RouteReply packet back to the source, which carries the route traversed by the RouteRequest packet received.To avoid routing information flooding, this thesis further proposes a new routing protocol called GDHU (GPS-assisted DSR for Hierarchical UAGV-TN) based on analysis of existing routing protocols for MANET. GNHU takes the advantage of Global Positioning System (GPS) in VBN nodes to aid route discovery, maintenance, and routing decision making.Simulation results with NS2 have shown that performance of GDHU is superior over traditional DSR (Dynamic Source Routing) protocols in term of average end-to-end delay of data packets and normalized routing overhead in addition to packet delivery rate while maintaining the same level of packet lost rate as traditional DSR.