FANS: Flying Ad-hoc Network Simulator

Abstract

Advancement in the Embedded and Microelectromechanical systems have led to the development of small, low cost and light weight Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Multiple such UAVs can be used to form a Flying Ad-hoc Network (FANET) to assist in various military, civilian and commercial applications. For effective real-time implementation of FANET, a rigorous testing is needed, both in simulation and using hardware testbeds. In this paper, we propose a Flying Ad-hoc Network Simulator (FANS) platform. This co-simulator platform interlinks Network Simulator (ns-3) and robot simulator (Gazebo) with help of Robot Operating System (ROS). We showcase an implementation of land-area survey application of FANET using this platform. A tailor-made topology for the land-area survey application along with network protocol stack has been designed, implemented and analysed using the developed platform. The results for the land area survey application have been show-cased for network parameters such as Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), hop-by-hop delay and end-to-end delay. © 2022 ACM.