Routing protocol design for drone-cell communication networks

This paper is concerned with the design of routing protocol capable of congestion mitigation for drone-cells communication networks where drone-cells remain stationary in the sky as relays. All of the (distance or hop-count based) existing routing protocols can perform well when the network is lightly loaded. Once the network is heavily loaded, a large number of packets might be backlogged in queues of network nodes since these protocols can not be aware of the network congestion condition. In this paper, we propose a queuing delay and transmission delay based routing protocol (QDTD) to relieve the network congestion caused by heavily loaded traffic. First, QDTD designs a novel ForWard-Back (FWB) queue architecture that significantly reduces the number of queues maintained at each network node. Second, both queuing delay and transmission delay are leveraged as a routing metric to enhance the performance of QDTD. Experimental results show that QDTD can effectively relieve the network congestion and reduce the overall network delay and achieve high throughput.