Beacon-Based Hybrid Routing Protocol for Large-Scale Unmanned Vehicle Ad Hoc Network

In this paper, we designed a beacon-based hybrid routing protocol to adapt to the new forms of intelligent warfare, accelerate the application of unmanned vehicles in the military field, and solve the problems such as high maintenance cost, path failure, and repeated routing pathfinding in large-scale unmanned vehicle network communications for new battlefields. This protocol used the periodic broadcast pulses initiated by the beacon nodes to provide synchronization and routing to the network and established a spanning tree through which the nodes communicated with each other. An NS3 platform was used to build a dynamic simulation environment of service data to evaluate the network performance. The results showed that when it was used in a range of 5 ~ 35 communication links, the beacon-based routing protocol’s PDR was approximately 10% higher than that of AODV routing protocol. At 5 ~ 50 communication links, the result was approximately 20% higher than the DSDV routing protocol. The routing load was not related to the number of nodes and communication link data and the protocol had better performance than traditional AODV and DSDV routing protocol, which reduced the cost of the routing protocol and effectively improved the stability and reliability of the network. The protocol we designed is more suitable for the scenarios of large-scale unmanned vehicle network communication in the future AI battlefield.