A Neighbor Discovery Algorithm for UAV Networking Based on Directional Antennas

Abstract

Using directional antennas in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarm has many advantages, such as longer transmission range, spatial reuse, anti-jamming and low probability of intercept. Neighbor discovery is a crucial step in the initialization of UAV networking. We introduce a neighbor discovery algorithm based on iterative common neighbors (ICN-ND), which can reduce the time of neighbor discovery process and the networking delay. To avoid the huge exchange-data quantity, we use the orientation and distance to represent the neighbor's location instead of latitude and longitude. Compared with the scan-based algorithm, the ICN-ND has better performance on the time to complete the neighbor discovery process and the convergence speed, which is validated the practicality by QualNet simulations.