Adaptive UAV Swarm Networking with Reception Determined Routing

Due to the intermittent nature of wireless transmission, link state awareness is important to enhance the success probability and efficiency of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) networking, which is however resource consuming especially in the high mobility scenario. In this paper, we utilize the broadcast feature of wireless channels to infer the real-time link state along with packet forwarding, and propose a reception determined routing (RDR) mechanism. Specifically, for each hop, the transmission node broadcasts the packet, and multiple reception nodes together decide the optimal one to forward the packet based on packet reception, network topology, and historical paths. The key challenge lies in making appropriate decisions based on fused information distributively. A path repair mechanism is also proposed to further enhance routing reliability by dealing with node mobility and link down. Packetlevel simulation results show that RDR achieves a higher packet delivery ratio (up to 62.3 %) and supports larger network scales (up to 79.5 % improvements) compared to state-of-the-art mechanisms.