Enhanced Redundant Weighted Clustered Scheme for Damaged S-UAV

A spontaneous group of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is denoted as a swarm of UAVs (S-UAVs). The UAVs communicate wirelessly and cooperate to accomplish tasks. In crisis scenarios such as flooding or earthquakes, all UAVs are at risk of getting damaged and thus non-functional. A non- functional UAV will result in a disconnected network, especially if that UAV is highly responsible for packet forwarding. S- UAV s are dynamic networks; clustering is one of the most adopted routing schemes in S-UAVs. The clustering scheme groups the UAVs into clusters where each cluster is formed of a cluster head (CH) and cluster members (CMs). Only the CH can handle inter-cluster communication. Due to the crucial role played by the CH, its selection is a continuous field of research. This paper proposes an enhanced clustered weighted scheme with redundancy to ensure end-to-end communication. The proposed scheme is based on a weighted formula for the primary CH, redundant CH, and CMs selection. The weighted formula calculates a cluster index based on the distance, the speed, and the reward index. A new component is added to the reward index which is performance. The redundant CH is selected to automatically replace the primary CH whenever it is damaged. If the redundant CH becomes inoperable, the second redundant CH will take over. Each cluster is formed of n CMs and will have n-2 redundant CHs. The results obtained from the conducted simulation experiments concluded that this promising scheme decreases data loss in a crisis case scenario.