Flying ad hoc networks (FANETs), composed of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), possess characteristics of flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and rapid deployment, rendering them highly attractive for a wide range of civilian and military applications. FANETs are special mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), FANETs have the characteristics of faster network topology changes and limited energy. Existing reactive routing protocols are unsuitable for the highly dynamic and limited energy of FANETs. For the lithium battery-powered UAV, flight endurance lasts from half an hour to two hours. The fast-moving UAV not only affects the packet delivery rate, average throughput, and end-to-end delay but also shortens the flight endurance. Therefore, research is urgently needed into a high-performance routing protocol with high energy efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel routing protocol called AO-AOMDV, which utilizes arithmetic optimization (AO) to enhance the ad hoc on-demand multi-path distance vector (AOMDV) routing protocol. The AO-AOMDV utilizes a fitness function to calculate the fitness value of multiple paths and employs arithmetic optimization for selecting the optimal route for routing selection. Our experiments were conducted using NS3 with three evaluation metrics: the packet delivery ratio, network lifetime, and average end-to-end delay. We compare this algorithm to routing protocols including AOMDV and AODV. The results indicate that the proposed AO-AOMDV attained a higher packet delivery ratio, network lifetime, and lower average end-to-end delay.
Keywords: AO-AOMDV; AOMDV; FANETs; arithmetic optimization.