A Virtual-Potential-Field-Based Cooperative Opportunistic Routing Protocol for UAV Swarms

Due to highly dynamic links and unstable wireless channels, designing reliable and efficient routing protocols for UAV swarm networks is challenging. In this paper, a modified virtual potential field method is developed to coordinate the UAV swarm and provide local topology information. Both coordination and mutual influence between UAVs are taken into consideration for virtual force calculation. Next, a new Virtual-Potential-Field-based Cooperative Opportunistic Routing (VPFCOR) protocol is proposed. VPFCOR comprehensively combines three main metrics for candidate ordering, i.e., forwarding distance, virtual force and remaining energy. With these metrics, VPFCOR can effectively adapt to different tasks, take smaller routing overhead and meet the real-time requirement. Simulation results are presented to obtain the optimal parameter settings and validate the effectiveness of our proposed protocol.