Random Network Coding Enabled Routing in Swarm Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Networks

Routing protocol design is one of the major challenges for swarm UAV networks. Due to the characteristics of a dynamic network topology, the low-complexity and the large volume of UAV devices, existing routing protocols based on network topology information, and routing table updates are not applicable in swarm UAV networks. In this paper, a Random Network Coding (RNC) enabled routing protocol is proposed to support an efficient routing process, which does not require network topology information or pre-determined routing tables. With the proposed routing protocol, the routing process could be significantly expedited, since each forwarding UAV may have already overheard some encoded packets in previous hops. As a result, some hops may be required to deliver a few encoded packets, and less hops may need to be completed in the whole routing process. The corresponding simulation study is conducted, demonstrating that our proposed routing protocol is able to facilitate a more efficient routing process.