Geographic load aware routing algorithm for highly dynamic airborne networks

Due to the high mobility of the aerial vehicle nodes, dynamic changes of the topology structure and the time-varying node trajectories, highly dynamic airborne networks (HDAN) suffer problems such as low data delivery ratio, high data congestion potential and poor stability. In order to address these problems, a geographic load aware routing algorithm was presented. This proposed algorithm defines a new dynamic routing metric for the next hop selection, which is adaptive to the topology changes, and it also introduces relative velocity, which is intended to amend errors caused by simply considering geographic information. The algorithm also reduces the congestion ratio of the network, according to the queue information exchange between the neighbors which is used to indicate local load level. The simulations show that the proposed routing algorithm is capable of reducing both end-to-end delay and the probability of delivery loss, therefore it enhances the reliability of the data transmission.