Routing in unmanned aerial ad hoc networks: Introducing a route reliability criterion

The Reactive-Greedy-Reactive (RGR) protocol, as proposed in [2], is a routing protocol specifically designed for unmanned aeronautical ad hoc networks. Since RGR is based on the Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV), the routes with the least number of hops are ultimately preferred during the route discovery. Overall, freshness and path length (in hops) are the two criteria that govern route selection. In this paper, we improve the process of route selection in RGR by adding a criterion based on route reliability/stability. Route stability here is measured by means of a concept called reliable distance. Route selection will prefer reliable routes before considering route length and freshness. Simulations in Opnet show a considerable improvement in performance at virtually no additional cost.