UAV Assisted Disruption Tolerant Routing

Abstract

In order to provide network connectivity in highly partitioned ad-hoc networks, we propose a routing strategy that incorporates an existing ad-hoc routing protocol, ad hoc on demand distance vector (AODV), with disruption tolerant networking (DTN) a la store-carry-forward mechanisms using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as carriers. This paper focuses on the design, implementation, and evaluation of the routing strategy. The major contribution of this work is the implementation of our DTN aware routing protocol on top of existing and mostly unmodified AODV. We show the advantage of the DTN protocol through simulation using ns-2