The growing need for wireless communication has resulted in the widespread usage of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in a variety of applications. Designing a routing protocol for UAVs is paramount as well as challenging due to its dynamic attributes. The difficulty stems from features other than mobile ad-hoc networks (MANET), such as aerial mobility in 3D space and frequently changing topology. This paper analyses the performance of four topology-based routing protocols: geographic routing protocol (GRP), dynamic source routing (DSR), ad-hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV), and optimized link state routing (OLSR), using practical simulation software OPNET 14.5. We compared and analyzed the performance using performance metrics like throughput, delay, and data drop rate. Moreover, we proposed an optimized enhanced OLSR routing protocol by reducing holding time, named E-OLSR. The optimized OLSR settings provide better performance than the conventional request for comments (RFC 3626) in the experiment, making it suitable for use in UAV ad-hoc network (UANET) environments. Simulation results indicate the proposed E-OLSR outperforms the existing OLSR and achieves supremacy over other protocols mentioned in this paper.


Paper history:

Received: 30 November 2021
Accepted: 07 January 2022
Published: 13 January 2022