Research On Ad Hoc UAS Networks And Routing Protocols

Past experiences in wars have proved that information is vital for winning abattle or a war in modern times; therefore, modern war has been referred to as"information-centric". For the importance of networks in supporting informationexchange and processing, modern war is also referred to as beingnetwork-centric. In last two decades, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles/Systems(UAV/UAS) have drawn much attention from military circle and played moreand more important roles in the battle fields for their versatile functionality andlow-costs (in manufacture, pilot training and life-saving). This is exactly theincentive of the research work presented in this thesis.The main innovative contributions of the thesis can be summarized as: a)introduced three new concepts relevant to UAS networks, including GDSN,COM, and DRNA, which cover from the military global network, through UAStactic networks to cooperated operation mode; and b) introduced three newrouting algorithms suitable for future UAS operation.According to dynamic nature of future "network-centric war", this thesismodels the military network as a Global Dynamically-reconfigurable StrategicNetwork (GDSN). To meet strategic and tactic requirements, a GDSN relevantto aerial systems consists of a Headquarter System (HS), a CommunicationRelay System (CRS), and multiple Manned/Unmanned Aerial System TacticNetworks (MAS/UAS-TN). To further take the advantage of GDSN in jointaction among a group of UAS, a Cooperated Operation Mode (UAS-COM) isdiscussed and backed up by an application to the project called "MicrowaveInterference Network". In view that the UAS is getting smaller and smaller andmoves faster than other vehicles, and works in an unsatisfactory and hostilewireless communication environment, this dissertation introduced a frameworkof a novel network architecture called DRNA (Dynamically Re-definableNetwork Architecture).Chapters 3 through 6 are the main parts of the thesis, which address torouting algorithms at the network layer in UAS-TN although other layertechniques are more or less involved. Chapter 3 presents a comprehensive study and analysis to existing routing algorithms in MANET, which provides abackground for the research work and leads to focusing on multi-path routing.Chapter 4 combines the most popular OLSR (Optimal Link State Routing)protocol in MANET with source routing and leads to a new routing protocolcalled SRMP-OLSR (Source Routing based Multi-Path OLSR). Simulationresults of SRMP-OLSR have shown that with this protocol, throughput can beimproved especially in heavily loaded conditions, and data loss rate and meantransit delay can be reduced.Chapter 5 further refines multi-path strategy by introduction a new conceptcalled Load Degree. By adaptively assigning Load Degree to individual paths inMulti-path routing according to transmission performance at lower layers,load-balance can be maintained and overall utility of transmission capability canbe improved. This algorithm is called Load-based Adaptive Multi-PathDynamical Source Routing (LAMP-DSR).Chapter 6 introduces a new routing protocol called MAH-MPR (MobileAgent based Hybrid Multi-Path Routing), which combines the Mobile Agent(MA) concept with ACO (Ant Colony Optimization) algorithm and takesadvantages of pre-active routing and on-demand routing. Simulation resultshave shown that the performance of MAH-MPR is superior over that of AODV(Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector) routing strategy.Chapter 7 concludes the thesis and suggests potential research works in thefuture.