SMURF: Reliable Multipath Routing in Flying Ad-Hoc Networks

In a Flying Ad-Hoc Network, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), (i.e. drones or quadcopters), use wireless communication to exchange data, status updates, and commands between each other and with the control center. However, due to the movement of UAVs, maintaining communication is difficult, particularly when multiple hops are needed to reach the destination. In this work, we propose the Stochastic Multipath UAV Routing for FANETs (SMURF) protocol, which exploits trajectory tracking information from the drones to compute the routes with the highest reliability. SMURF is a centralized protocol, as the control center gathers location updates and sends routing commands following the Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm over a separate long-range low bitrate technology such as LoRaWAN. Additionally, SMURF exploits multiple routes, to increase the probability that at least one of the routes is usable. Simulation results show a significant reliability improvement over purely distance-based routing, and that just 3 routes are enough to achieve performance very close to oracle-based routing with perfect information.