A shortest path routing algorithm for unmanned aerial systems based on grid position

The unmanned aerial system (UAS), as a typical aeronautical Ad-hoc network (AANET) system, which is composed of unmanned aerial vehicle clusters has a lot of advantages such as flexible deployment, excellent cost-benefit ratio and free from the effect of environment. It will be an important part of the space-sky information network in the future. Due to the fast-moving of nodes in AANET/UAS, the topology changes frequently. The routing overhead becomes huge and inefficient, and connectivity keeping becomes difficult. In this paper, a shortest path routing algorithm based on grid position no center(GPNC-SP algorithm) is proposed, which uses the logical grid distance to replace the original Euclidean distance to reduce the sensitivity of fast-moving nodes. This algorithm automatically computes and maintains the adjacency relationship and topology structure by perception and updating algorithm and adopts Dijkstra algorithm to achieve the shortest routing path. Also, a regional reconstruction strategy(RSS) is designed to optimize the routing path dynamically. At the same time, two metrics, i.e., the percentage of the effective communication area(P_eca%) and the sensitivity with logical grid size (S_g) are used to determine the optional scope of logical grid width. Comparing with the two traditional typical routing protocols (DREAM and DSDV algorithms), this algorithm sacrifices a certain degree of communication distance to achieve better performances of network overhead, link stability, and calculating speed. The final simulation experiments under the Matlab environment demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of this algorithm.