Redundant Clustered Scheme Based on Weighted Cluster Head Selection for Damaged S-UAV.

A swarm of UAVs (S-UAVs) is a spontaneous wireless network composed of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) cooperating together to upload data to the internet. In crisis cases such as flooding or earthquakes, one or more UAVs might be non-functional, resulting in a disconnected network. Due to the continuous changes in S-UAVs, one of the most reliable routing schemes is clustering. Clustering scheme splits the network into clusters with a cluster head and cluster members. The cluster head is responsible for all intra-cluster communication, which consists of communication between the clusters. The selection of the cluster head has a high impact on the performance of the routing scheme. This paper proposes a new clustered weighted scheme with redundancy to ensure end-to-end communication even with some non-functional UAVs. The proposed protocol has a new weighted formula for the primary cluster head selection. In addition, the proposed protocol selects the secondary cluster heads based on an elimination process. The parameters of the weighted formula are the distance, the speed, and the rewarding index. The rewarding index is calculated based on the latency. This protocol proposes the presence of a secondary cluster head that automatically replaces the primary cluster head whenever it is non-functional, thus ensuring the stability of the connection. The proposed scheme is simulated using MATLAB. The results obtained are discussed towards the end of this paper. The obtained results conclude that this is a promising protocol to decrease data loss in a crisis case scenario.