FM-MAC: A Multi-Channel MAC Protocol for FANETs with Directional Antenna

Abstract

Nowadays, Flying Ad hoc NETworks (FANETs) which consists of multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are widely used in various military and civilian applications which need different Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees, for example, low delay for safety packet and high throughput for service packet. Meanwhile, to provide high bandwidth and spatial reuse, directional antennas are equipped on the UAVs more and more. However, due to the high mobility of UAVs, how to support different QoS with directional antenna is challenging for Media Access Control (MAC) protocol of FANETs. Recently, multi-channel MAC protocol has been proved to be effective to support different QoS. In this paper, we propose a FANETs multi-channel MAC protocol called FM-MAC, which combines the advantages of multi-channel and directional antenna to provide different QoS guarantees. Firstly, a reservation scheme based on mobile prediction is proposed to address the link interruption issue brought by high mobility of UAVs. Secondly, we propose a preemption mechanism to provide priority for service packets. Simulation results show that compared with other two representative protocols, FM-MAC not only improves the throughput of service packets, but also achieves lower delay and higher reliability for safety packets.