Cross layer optimization for cooperative mobile ad-hoc UAV network

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) network has been increasingly used for military and civilian applications. Due to the lack of infrastructure, each UAV in such network is designed to act as an end system and a router. Cooperative relaying has been proposed as a promising transmission technique for UAVs Ad-Hoc network that effectively creates spatial diversity. However, the traditional layered architecture is not flexible enough to achieve certain quality of services (QoS) due to the dynamics of UAVs Ad-Hoc network. To achieve more efficient communications while minimizing the symbol error probability (SEP), we propose a cross layer design to adjust some key parameters like channel bit error rate which is indeed affected by the aircraft attitude in the first three layers. Based on location knowledge and contention processes, the proposed cross-layer protocol, Contention-Based Optimized Link State Routing Protocol (COLSR), provides an efficient, distributed approach to select next hops and optimal relays to form a communication path, which consequently improve the overall performance of UAV Ad-Hoc network. OPNET Simulation results demonstrate that COLSR can efficiently improve the SEP performance and outperforms the existing protocol BOSS significantly in terms of the packet error rate, and overall throughput.