MASRP: A mobility-assisted service routing protocol for task-oriented flying ad-hoc networks

Abstract

Task-driven unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks, as a special type of flying ad hoc network (FANET), are designed to accomplish cooperative tasks through dynamic inter-UAV communication. However, the high mobility and sparse topology of such networks often lead to routing holes and intermittent connectivity, posing significant challenges for reliable data delivery. To address this challenge, we propose MASRP, a mobility-assisted service routing protocol. MASRP introduces service-aware announcements that enable nodes to obtain information about the service capabilities of other nodes in the network. It also employs a two-phase forwarding strategy to reduce communication overhead and leverages UAV mobility to recover broken routes. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that MASRP improves service response ratio by up to 88% under sparse density, achieves around 90% higher completion rate under high requester load, offers approximately 22% higher reliability under heterogeneous service-type distributions, and reduces traffic consumption per successful response by about 24%.