A novel routing metric for IEEE 802.11s-based swarm-of-drones applications

Abstract

With the proliferation of drones in our daily lives, there is an increasing need for handling their numerous challenges. One of such challenge arises when a swarm-of-drones are deployed to accomplish a specific task which requires coordination and communication among the drones. While this swarm-of-drones is essentially a special form of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) which has been studied for many years, there are still some unique requirements of drone applications that necessitates re-visiting MANET approaches. These challenges stem from 3-D environments the drones are deployed in, and their specific way of mobility which adds to the wireless link management challenges among the drones. In this paper, we consider an existing routing standard that is used to enable meshing capability among Wi-Fi enabled nodes, namely IEEE 802.11s and adopt its routing capabilities for swarm-of-drones. Specifically, we propose a link quality metric called SrFTime as an improvement to existing Airtime metric which is the 802.11s default routing metric to enable better network throughput for drone applications. This new metric is designed to fit the link characteristics of drones and enable more efficient routes from drones to their gateway. The evaluations in the actual 802.11s standard indicates that our proposed metric outperforms the existing one consistently under various conditions.