An adaptive forwarding protocol for three dimensional Flying Ad Hoc Networks

An adaptive forwarding protocol (AFP) for 3D Flying Ad Hoc Networks (FANETs) is proposed in this paper. The main objective is to calculate forwarding probability adaptively in order to increase the efficiency of forwarding in FANETs. The Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) nodes with longer distance to the last hop forwarder and closer to the destination rebroadcast the message with higher probability. In addition, a forwarding zone criterion is included in the proposed protocol to reduce the broken links due to mobility of nodes among the intermediate nodes. We describe the protocol, implement it and evaluate its performance using NS-2 network simulator. Simulation results reveal that the proposed protocol achieves better performance in terms of the average packet drop fraction and average end-to-end delay, which is respectively compared with VBF.