Design and evaluation of airborne communication networks

Airborne networks have huge potential in civilian and military applications. This paper is concerned with protocol design and evaluation for communication in airborne networks where UAVs are flying randomly in sky as relays. Faced with this intermittent connection network scenario as well as high loss rate caused by high mobility, a simulator for airborne communication network is desired and custom-designed protocols are needed to systematically address these problems. The contribution of this paper is two folded. First, we propose a Fountain-code based Greedy Position-Assisted routing scheme, called FGPA, to improve the communication reliability and reduce the delay of communication. Second, we develop an airborne network simulator that captures more realistic features than the existing ones. Experiments in our simulator show that our proposed routing scheme can achieve lower delay than existing routing schemes with relatively low overhead.