LSTDA: Link Stability and Transmission Delay Aware Routing Mechanism for Flying Ad-Hoc Network (FANET)

The paper presents a new protocol called Link Stability and Transmission Delay Aware (LSTDA) for Flying Ad-hoc Network (FANET) with a focus on network corridors (NC). FANET consists of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) that face challenges in avoiding transmission loss and delay while ensuring stable communication. The proposed protocol introduces a novel link stability with network corridors priority node selection to check and ensure fair communication in the entire network. The protocol uses a Red-Black (R-B) tree to achieve maximum channel utilization and an advanced relay approach. The paper evaluates LSTDA in terms of End-to-End Delay (E2ED), Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), Network Lifetime (NLT), and Transmission Loss (TL), and compares it with existing methods such as Link Stability Estimation-based Routing (LEPR), Distributed Priority Tree-based Routing (DPTR), and Delay and Link Stability Aware (DLSA) using MATLAB simulations. The results show that LSTDA outperforms the other protocols, with lower average delay, higher average PDR, longer average NLT, and comparable average TL.