Data structure and working logic of scalable geographic multicast scheme in flying ad-hoc networks

A Flying Ad-hoc Network (FANET) is a wireless ad-hoc network specifically designed for the communication of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Multicast routing is one of the vital aspects in wireless ad-hoc networks. Research works have been proposed to tackle the challenges in multicast routing in ad-hoc network environments with multi-hop communication. Nevertheless, the conventional multicast routing mechanisms incur excessive control messages overhead when a large number of nodes experience frequent topological changes. A scalable geographic multicast routing mechanism, which specially require localized operation, and reduced overheads, are necessary. Multicast routing in FANETs is extremely challenging because of dynamic topology changes and network disconnection resulted from frequent mobility of nodes. In this paper, we present the data structure and scenario-based working logic description of a scalable and predictive geographic multicast routing mechanism in FANETs. In cases of uniform as well as random deployment scenarios, the evaluation result has revealed that when the communication range increases, the number of one-hop predicted forwarders to the source also increases.