An Enhanced ACO Routing Protocol for Flying Ad Hoc Network

Abstract

Introduction

1. UAVs and FANETs Overview:

• Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones or RPAs, are pilotless aircraft controlled remotely or autonomously.

• UAVs are used in both military and civilian domains, including pandemic response.

• Flying Ad Hoc Networks (FANETs) enable UAVs to form self-organizing, wireless networks with ground base stations (GBSs).

• FANETs are characterized by high mobility, low node density, and limited battery energy, which cause frequent link disconnections.

• FANETs outperform single-UAV systems by improving scalability, robustness, and energy efficiency in challenging environments.

2. Routing Challenges in FANETs:

• Routes must adapt to dynamic topology, low node density, and high mobility.

• Requirements include adaptability, energy-aware routing, low latency, high scalability, and reliable data delivery.

• Routing must be fast, efficient, and capable of maintaining optimal paths despite frequent changes.

3. Proposed Routing Protocol – HACORP:

• HACORP (Hybrid Ant Colony Optimization with Routing Protocol) improves on traditional protocols by using:

  • DCM (Distance Calculation Method): Uses GPS to compute distances between nodes and build efficient routing tables.

  • SBACO (Source-Based Ant Colony Optimization): Directs packets via shortest and least-cost paths using ant-based pheromone techniques.

  • Phases:

    • Phase 1: Nodes calculate distances and build neighbor lists.

    • Phase 2: Ants (agents) explore, reinforce, and maintain the optimal route using pheromone trails.

    • Maintenance: If a link breaks, RANTs (route-maintenance ants) help discover an alternate route.

4. Simulation and Performance Evaluation:

• Simulations run in MATLAB R2019a, testing 30–150 nodes using parameters like packet delivery rate (PDR), packet loss rate (PLR), throughput, and end-to-end delay (EED).

• Compared Protocols: HACO vs. AODV, Ant-Net, and others.

5. Results:

• Packet Delivery Rate (PDR): HACO = 98.8%, better than AODV = 97.2%

• Packet Loss Rate (PLR): HACO = 0.01%, better than AODV = 0.03%

• Throughput: HACO = 509.7 kbps, better than AODV = 474.8 kbps

• End-to-End Delay: HACO = 0.29 sec, lower than AODV = 0.58 sec

6. Why HACO Outperforms Traditional Protocols:

• Shortest path routing with minimal hops.

• Faster convergence and reduced search time via DCM.

• Efficient route maintenance and recovery without full rediscovery.

• Avoids route congestion and packet collisions.

• Pheromone-based decision-making avoids local optima and stagnation.

Conclusion

Toincreases theperformanceefficiencyoftherouting process in FANETs, a completely new proposed routing protocol named HACO is proposed in this paper. The DCM and SBACO combination at HACO minimize ant explore time, increases convergence speed, avoids packet blind broad- casting, provide quicker packet processing, and avoids stagnation issues. PDR and Throughput in HACO are improved by using optimized route without stagnation easy packet processing, and fast convergence speed. PLR isreduced by taking the shortest, non-congested path. Overhead is reduced byavoiding acts like blind packet broadcasting and multiple responses to a single packet. EED is reduced by quickly selecting the least-hope, on-congested shortest route. With respect to PDR, throughput, EED, and PLR, simulation results reveal that HACO performs better than traditional AODV protocol.In the future, we planto expand HACO with already existing the FANET system to high-traffic scenarios with flying nodes to compute performance measures such as through-put, packet- loss -rate, avg end-to- end delay, and packet-delivery- ratio.

References

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Copyright

Copyright © 2025 Tripti Gupta , Dr. Ajay Kumar Dadoria, Dr. Laxmi Shrivastava. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.