As a special type of mobile ad hoc network (MANET), the flying ad hoc network (FANET) has the potential to enable a variety of emerging applications in both civilian wireless communications (e.g., 5G and 6G) and the defense industry. The routing protocol plays a pivotal role in FANET. However, when designing the routing protocol for FANET, it is conventionally assumed that the aerial nodes move randomly. This is clearly inappropriate for a mission-oriented FANET (MO-FANET), in which the aerial nodes typically move toward a given destination from given departure point(s), possibly along a roughly deterministic flight path while maintaining a well-established formation, in order to carry out certain missions. In this paper, a novel cyber-physical routing protocol exploiting the particular mobility pattern of an MO-FANET is proposed based on cross-disciplinary integration, which makes full use of the mission-determined trajectory dynamics to construct the time sequence of rejoining and separating, as well as the adjacency matrix for each node, as prior information. Compared with the existing representative routing protocols used in FANETs, our protocol achieves a higher packet-delivery ratio (PDR) at the cost of even lower overhead and lower average end-to-end latency, while maintaining a reasonably moderate and stable network jitter, as demonstrated by extensive ns-3-based simulations assuming realistic configurations in an MO-FANET.

翻译：作为移动自组网（MANET）的一种特殊类型，飞行自组网（FANET）有望在民用无线通信（如5G和6G）以及国防工业中催生多种新兴应用。路由协议在FANET中起着关键作用。然而，在设计FANET路由协议时，传统上假设空中节点随机移动。这对于面向任务的FANET（MO-FANET）显然不适用——在此类网络中，空中节点通常为执行特定任务，从给定出发地朝向指定目的地移动，可能沿近似确定的航迹飞行，同时保持稳定的编队。本文基于跨学科融合，提出了一种利用MO-FANET特殊移动模式的新型信息物理路由协议，该协议充分利用任务决定的轨迹动态，构建节点重新加入与分离的时间序列以及各节点的邻接矩阵作为先验信息。与现有FANET代表性路由协议相比，我们的协议在维持合理适度且稳定的网络抖动前提下，以更低开销和更低平均端到端延迟为代价，实现了更高的数据包投递率（PDR），这一结论通过基于ns-3的大量仿真（采用MO-FANET实际配置）得到验证。