Performance evaluation for Q-learning based anycast routing protocol in unmanned aerial vehicle networks with multiple base stations

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) networks can be used for data transmission in emergency scenarios, relaying data from ground users to base stations (BSs). While UAV networks collaborating with multi-BSs can significantly enhance performance, existing UAV routing protocols predominantly focus on unicast routing and often neglect critical aspects such as base station discovery. In addition, the high mobility of UAVs and rapid changes in network topology also pose great challenges for existing multi-BS routing protocols to maintain efficient data transmission. Aiming at the above problems, this paper abstracts the routing of multi-base station UAV networks as anycast routing for dynamic networks and proposes a distributed anycast routing protocol called QARP to improve the data transmission performance. In QARP, base stations can be discovered automatically and parameters of Q-learning are dynamically adjusted to improve the efficiency of data transmission. The Link Duration Estimation is used to influence routing decision and dynamically adjust the hello message interval. A multiple base stations transmission value function is designed to indicate the performance of data transmission and is used to calculate the reward and update Q-table. The experimental results show that the QARP proposed in this paper outperforms existing multi-BS routing and Q-learning based routing protocols in terms of delay, packet delivery ratio and throughput in single base station and multiple base stations scenarios.