Performance Evaluation of Three Routing Protocols for Drone Communication Networks

With technological advancements in networking and wireless communication, the flying ad hoc network has emerged as a cost-effective relay network. Networks of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be cooperatively organized as an ad hoc network for effectively accomplishing complex tasks. Such a UAV network is deployed as a relay network that forwards and exchanges accurate and reliable end-to-end in-formation. However, the design of routing protocols is rendered difficult by flying constraints and extreme topology changes over a short time period. The performance of the routing protocols in such networks is considerably affected by high-speed nodes and extreme topology changes. Evaluating the routing protocol in a UAV network gives insight regarding the performance of the entire network. This paper evaluates, analyzes, and compares the performances of three routing protocols: Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV), Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR), and Destination-Sequenced Distance-Vector (DSDV). In most of the simulated cases, the AODV outperformed the OLSR and DSDV. The number of nodes, i.e., the network size, largely affected the throughput, packet delivery ratio (PDR), and end-to-end delay (E2E) of the network. However, the OLSR improved the performance of the average E2E; therefore, it is suitable for delay-sensitive applications. However, AODV outperformed the other protocols in terms of throughput and PDR because it reacts to topology changes. DSDV delivered the poorest PDR and throughput.