Position-Monitoring-Based Hybrid Routing Protocol for 3D UAV-Based Networks

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have emerged as prime technologies due to their compatible size and flexible architecture. UAV technology offers services in vast application such as inter-UAV communication, wireless sensors, and the future Internet of Things (IoT) due to its compatible architecture. A UAV’s speed varies while roaming, which may increase the risk of a connection failure. Various routing schemes have provided solutions to address this essential issue for three-dimensional (3D) UAV-based networks. The main category of UAV routing schemes is position-based routing schemes, which choose the best route based on the UAV’s location. However, position-based routing has the drawback that it depends on exact positioning and tracking. An efficient routing scheme can resolve the significant issue associated with UAV mobility in a 3D environment. This paper aims to address the issues of static preloaded location values by presenting a hybrid routing scheme named the Position-Monitor-based Hybrid Routing Protocol (PMHRP), which takes advantage of both geographic and topology-based routing protocols. The PMHRP establishes the shortest possible route based on a UAV’s Global Positioning System (GPS). Moreover, the proposed protocol utilizes the links for data forwarding. Furthermore, a disaster-based UAV scenario is adopted to provide connections to IoT devices. A detailed comparison analysis shows the proposed scheme’s extreme performance and results in up to 65% to 73% better packet delivery ratio (PDR) than batch mark schemes under standard 3D UAV scenarios. Compared to earlier work, the proposed scheme reduces the average delay by up to 68% to 75%. Further proposed routing schemes offer 70% to 72% more throughput than the existing routing schemes, and NRL (%) is 42% to 49% lower than the existing routing schemes. This happens because of the global routing information available at each UAV which is provided by the position head coordinator (PHC) UAV in the proposed work. © 2022 by the authors.