An Empirical and Analytical Study of the Impact of Hello Messages Parameters on the Packet Drop Ratio in UAANET

Abstract

Recently there has been an increasing interest in employing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in a wide range of applications, mainly in real-time surveillance and reconnaissance operations. UAVs have the ability of creating an ad hoc communication network in the air which is known as Unmanned Aeronautical Ad-hoc Network (UAANET). One of the most aspects that has a significant impact on the performance of these systems is the routing protocol. Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) is a very popular reactive protocol that has been widely used in UAANETs. One distinct aspect of this protocol is its ability to provide connectivity information via the use of Hello messages. However, using Hello messages also affects performance. Many previous studies have shown the impact of these messages on performance in MANET mobile networks, and that this effect is related to network conditions and parameters for preparing these messages. Therefore, this research focused on studying the performance of the AODV routing protocol in UAVs networks, where the nature of performance was determined in term of the rate of packet loss in all possible cases of a drone network. Then, the impact of changing the handshake settings (the allowed number of missing AHL handshakes in particular) on the recorded performance measures was studied. This research involves an empirical study using computer simulation as well as an analytical study based on other previous researches. The authors used OPNET network simulator for simulation purposes.