Routing in a Fleet of Micro Aerial Vehicles: First Experimental Insights

Abstract

Micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) have the potential to support civilian applications in large areas by providing an ad-hoc multi-hop wireless network. Yet, available network routing protocols have not been designed for the micro aerial use case and it is unclear how well they can cope in practice with the wireless link and topology dynamics posed by MAVs. To answer this question, we provide a first assessment of major ad-hoc routing protocols in a lab study. Further, we present measurement results for B.A.T.M.A.N. and greedy geographical routing in a small IEEE 802.11n MAV testbed and discuss potential directions for future research.