A review of research on routing protocols for unmanned aerial vehicle cluster self-organizing networks

The application of intelligent collaborative drone clusters in both civilian and military fields is becoming increasingly widespread, and the autonomous collaboration mechanism within the cluster is the key to efficiently and reliably completing tasks. In a drone cluster, routing protocol, as a key technology for self-organizing networks, directly determines the performance of the entire system. However, the dynamically changing topology, unbalanced business load, and uncertain network size pose significant challenges to protocol design. This article systematically introduces various routing protocols for unmanned aerial vehicle self-organizing networks based on networking requirements, and analyzes the task scenarios applicable to each routing protocol; Then, a comparative study was conducted on various routing protocols, and finally, the future research directions of routing protocols for unmanned aerial vehicle self-organizing networks were discussed.