UAV aided intelligent routing for ad-hoc wireless network in single-area theater

Large homogeneous ad hoc wireless networks have a problem: the bandwidth available to a mobile user decreases as the number of nodes in the network increases. Using the embedded ad-hoc networking mechanism, nodes are able to transport packets across the network in a multihop fashion. An embedded mobile backbone is dynamically constructed to form a 2-level physical heterogeneous multihop wireless network. These backbone nodes provide two critical functions: (1) direct communication between neighboring cluster heads; and (2) efficient route discovery in HSR. With the broadcast feature of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), the link state can be broadcast to backbone nodes instead of “flooding” on the level 2. Thus, the routing overhead can be tremendously reduced, and the throughput will be improved. We modified hierarchical state routing (HSR) to have an intelligent selection algorithm to reduce the system latency caused by the long propagation delay of the UAV channel. The performance of the system is evaluated through simulation experiments