Routing in unmanned aerial ad hoc networks: A recovery strategy for Greedy geographic forwarding failure

Unmanned Aeronautical Ad Hoc Networks (UAANETs) are a type of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) which are infrastructureless and self-organizing networks. The specificity of UAANETs is that they are formed by small and medium sized Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) also known as drones. In UAANETs as well as in MANETs, geographic routing is widely used. Geographic routing relies on Greedy Forwarding (GF), also called Greedy Geographic Forwarding (GGF). GGF fails when a packet arrives at a node that has no neighbor closer to the destination than it is. The node in this situation is referred to as a void node. In this paper, we propose a strategy that salvages packets in void node situations. We thereafter append this strategy to a protocol that features GGF. Simulations in OPNET show an increase in packet delivery ratio of about 2% at virtually no additional cost.