Bio-inspired routing over FANET in emergency situations to support multimedia traffic

A QoS routing to select the best paths among Drones supporting incoming calls and multimedia traffic in emergency or critical situations is proposed. In situations where drones' teams are requested to cover areas where mobile users can need to communicate under the absence of network infrastructure, a self-organized on-the fly network becomes an essential goal. Cooperating with a critical network infrastructure, deploying a QoS aware path selection strategy supporting QoS requests and multimedia traffic such as VoIP and Video traffic can become a key issue to face. In this paper, a bio-inspired strategy to maintain the drones' network topology in a ligthway manner is proposed. Two metrics considered in a joint unified metric are proposed in order to balance traffic load and, at the same time, select the shortest routes. A comparison with an enhanced Link-State (LS) routing has been performed where the minimum hop count metric has been considered together to a LS routing with maximum available bandwidth metric. Performance evaluation has been evaluated in terms of control overhead, number or admitted calls, average bandwidth utilization.