Multicast routing in swarm of UAVs

Abstract

Recently, the deployment of a swarm of cooperative Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVS) to pursue a task is enjoying increasing success, since a group of UAVS instead of one single UAV leads to many advantages, for example the possibility to extend the mission coverage, to guarantee a reliable ad-hoc network, or to enhance the service performance. However, it also poses many challenges in designing networking protocols such as, the dynamic topology change. In this work, we study the multicast routing problem in swarm of UAVS, which aims at delivering information to specific members of flying nodes. Our objective is to provide detailed classification of existing swarm routing protocols considering transmission strategies and to propose a new Energy eflicient Multicast Routing Protocol for UAVS Swarm (SEMRP) taking into consideration the aforementioned challenges and aimning to satisfy COronaVirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) applications. The results of the simulation conducted using NS-2 simulator advocate for the efficiency of our method through two proposed versions (SEMRP-V1 and SEMRP-V2) in term of reducing the total emission energy (at least by 10 dBm), optimizing the End-to-End Delay by 44%, and increasing the packet delivery ratio by more than to 22% compared to SP-GMRF protocol.