Abstract
The increasing demand of routing in the field of communication is the most important subject in ad hoc networks now a days. Flying Ad Hoc Network (FANET) is one of the emerging areas that evolved from Mobile Ad Hoc Networks. Selecting the best optimal path in any network is a real challenge for a routing protocol. Because the network performance like throughput, Quality of Service (QoS), user experience, response time and other key parameters depend upon the efficiency of the algorithm running inside the routing protocol. The complexity and diversity of the problem is augmented due to dynamic spatial and temporal mobility of FANET nodes. Due to these challenges the performance and efficiency of the routing protocol becomes very critical. This paper presents a novel routing protocol for FANET using modified AntHocNet. Ant colony optimization technique or metaheuristics in general has shown better dependability and performance as compared to other legacy best path selection techniques. Energy stabilizing parameter introduced in this study improves energy efficiency and overall network performance. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol is better than generic Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and other traditional routing protocols utilized in FANET.