| Based on the rapid growth in the applications of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in the last decade, the idea of in-flight communication among UAVs has been proposed in cooperative missions. Since medium and small sized UAVs are cheap and deployable, several of them can be used to form what we call an Unmanned Aeronautical Ad-hoc Networks (UAANETs).;Due to the availability of location information, geographic protocols can be an option for routing in UAANETs. Although we show that greedy geographic forwarding alone is not sufficient in UAANETs, our results illustrate that a combination of greedy geographic forwarding with a reactive mechanism, which forms a Reactive-Greedy-Reactive (RGR) routing, can be beneficial. Simulation results show that RGR outperforms existing protocols such as Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV), and greedy geographic forwarding in searching missions in terms of delay and packet delivery ratio while its overhead is comparable with traditional mechanisms. |
