A quality of service‐aware routing protocol for FANETs

Abstract

SummaryFlying ad hoc networks (FANETs) are a class of highly dynamic mobile ad hoc networks in which flying UAVs coordinate among themselves for delivering the data to the applications. Data routing in FANETs has been a challenge due to the inherent mobile and unpredictable movement of UAV nodes. This paper proposes a quality of service‐aware routing protocol (QARP) for FANETs which incorporates hybrid nature‐inspired heuristics to identify optimized routes to the destination UAVs. The routing mechanism operates in two phases. In the first phase, the neighbour discovery initializes the adapted firefly algorithm to identify nodes with least packet delivery delay to the destination. In the second phase, the Gaussian quantum‐behaved particle swarm optimization meta‐heuristic algorithm is utilized to identify the most optimal nodes to create a route for data delivery to destination. The proposed protocol has been tested to perform better in terms of delay, routing overhead, throughput and packet delivery ratio in comparison to MA‐DP‐AODV, MDA‐AODV and MDRMA routing protocols.