Design and Analysis of An Intelligent Wireless Ad Hoc Routing Protocol and Controller for UAV Networks

This thesis proposes a UAV to UAV communication approach that is based on Software Defined Networking (SDN). The proposed approach uses a controller as a central source of information to assign routes that maximize throughput, distribute traffic evenly, reduce network delay and utilize all network elements. An SDN based WiFi approach is used in order to provide seamless WiFi connectivity to users as they move around the network. Simulation results show that the proposed approach can improve throughput by over 300%. Simulation results also show a reduction in network delay for delay sensitive packets to nearly 25% and increase in packet delivery ratio (PDR) by 26 times for packets with higher priority. Simulation results were compared to two common ad hoc routing protocols AODV and OLSR.