Secure and congestion-aware optical switching framework for efficient routing in flying ad-hoc networks

Abstract

Flying Ad Hoc Network (FANET) communication mechanisms should accommodate high data throughput, low latency, and secure data transfer under conditions of rapid mobility and highly dynamic topologies. Hybrid RF/FSO links have the potential to increase bandwidths and reliability significantly, but most of the currently available routing schemes for FANETs assess problems of congestion control, optical path management, and security separately. We introduce SCA-OSF (Secure and Congestion-Aware Optical Switching Framework) for the introduction of software-defined optical control, which establishes light paths dynamically; congestion-aware multi-metric routing algorithms that consider the residual capacity, propagation delay, and optical link quality; and a lightweight trust-aware encryption layer that safeguards against unwanted behavior with minimal computational cost. This architecture shall be implemented in a Python-based simulator that also incorporates UAV mobility, optical fading, atmospheric attenuation, RF fallback behavior, and trust-driven path pruning. In keeping with such simulation experiments performed over multiple randomized runs having confidence-based averaging, SCA-OSF outperformed GPSR, AODV, OSPF-TE, HFAR, and SDN-OCP in terms of significantly high throughput, low latency, reduced congestion probability, and improved packet delivery ratio. SCA-OSF presents a scalable optical networking solution that is also resilient to congestion and aware of security, therefore falling under the scope of Optical Fiber Technology concerning advanced optical switching and emerging architectures of optical-wireless networks.