Evaluating the Impact of Beacon Interval and Neighbor Timeout Timer on the Performance of Geographical Routing in FANETs

Geographical routing provides a robust and scalable routing solution for Flying Ad Hoc Networks (FANETs). In this, the reliability of forwarding decisions depends on the accuracy of the position information of neighboring nodes stored in the neighbor table. Each node broadcasts beacon packets to exchange its position with neighboring nodes after a fixed time interval known as beacon interval (BI) to construct the neighbor table. The node that receives the beacon packet adds an entry in its neighbor table for the originator of a beacon. That entry is valid only for a specific time called neighbor timeout timer (NTOT). The fixed value setting of beacon interval and neighbor timeout timer may deteriorate the routing performance in a dynamic scenario like FANETs, where network characteristics change frequently. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate the impact of fixed beacon interval and fixed neighbor timeout timer on the performance of geographical routing. To do so, extensive simulations are conducted by varying the value of beacon interval and neighbor timeout timer for different network settings in ns-3. The simulation results demonstrate that the beacon interval and neighbour timeout timer significantly affects the performance of geographical routing. Also, geographical routing exhibits the best performance at BI = 0.5s and NTOT = 1.5s in most network conditions.