Betweenness Centrality Based Dynamic Source Routing for Flying Ad Hoc Networks in Marching Formation

TL;DR

The paper tackles routing in FANETs operating in marching formations, where topology is highly dynamic and relay importance is unequal. It introduces the Gauss-Markov group (GMG) mobility model to capture leader–follower motion and a betweenness centrality-based dynamic source routing (BC-DSR) protocol that weights edges by node centrality using $C_B(n)$ and selects paths with $w_{n_1,n_2}=\frac{1}{C_B(n_1)+C_B(n_2)}$. ns-3 simulations show BC-DSR improves packet-delivery ratio (PDR) and reduces average end-to-end latency and routing-overhead ratio (ROR) compared to AODV, DSR, DSR-PM, and CPR-TD, while maintaining reasonable network jitter. This approach integrates mobility structure and network topology, enabling more robust, task-oriented routing for mission-critical FANET deployments.

Abstract

Designing high-performance routing protocols for flying ad hoc networks (FANETs) is challenging due to the diversity of applications and the dynamics of network topology. The existing general-purpose routing protocols for ad hoc networks often oversimplify mobility patterns and disregard the unequal importance of nodes, resulting in suboptimal routing decisions that are unsuitable for task-oriented FANETs. To break the bottleneck, in this paper we propose a betweenness centrality based dynamic source routing (BC-DSR) protocol for a flying ad hoc network (FANET) in marching formation. Firstly, we introduce a Gauss-Markov group (GMG) mobility model based on the leader-follower pattern, which accurately captures the temporal and spatial correlations of node movements in the realistic marching formation. Besides, we exploit the concept of BC defined in graph theory to measure the structural unequal importance of relay nodes, i.e., to determine link weights, in the particular marching formation topology. The path of least cost is calculated relying on a weighted directed graph constructed. The ns-3 based simulation results demonstrate that our BCDSR protocol achieves higher packet-delivery ratio and lower average end-to-end latency and routing overhead ratio than representative benchmark protocols used in FANETs, while maintaining a reasonably small network jitter.

Figures (7)

• Figure 1: The topology of a FANET in marching formation.
• Figure 2: Illustration of the GMG mobility model.
• Figure 3: The packet header.
• Figure 4: The flowchart of the process of route establishment.
• Figure 5: The impact of different mobility models on the PDR and the average E2E latency.