On the characteristics of next generation for redundant clustered reliable data transmission scheme in critical IoT infrastructures

A wireless network composed of UAVs collaborating to upload data to the internet is known as a swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles (S-UAVs). UAVs are utilized extensively to convey important data during emergency situations like earthquakes or floods. Clustering, which divides the network into clusters with a cluster head (CH) and cluster members (CM), is one of the most dependable routing strategies in S-UAVs. A disconnected cluster and loss of data are the result of a damaged or non-functional CH, which is a topic that is rarely explored. This work proposes an improved multiple redundant routing strategy based on three weighted parameters: energy, rewarding, and propagation delay for reliable data transmission through ensuring a functional CH. This paper exclusively uses the coefficient of variation to set the weights used in the weighted calculation that generates a new parameter denoted as cluster index. Based on the cluster index, the nodes are selected as CH or CMs, thus forming the clusters. To decrease the probability of non-functional CH, we propose the cooperation of different types of agents, which are vehicles and UAVs in our case. Having different types of agents will increase the system’s reliability due to their different level of non-functionality risk. For instance, vehicles are more vulnerable to being non-functional in earthquakes, whereas UAVs are at higher risk in tornadoes. To ensure a functional CH, a redundant CH is selected to take over the routing duties to ensure connection stability. Based on the decreasing cluster index, every node will have the succeeding node selected as a redundant node to ensure that despite the number of non-functional nodes a functional CH still exists. MATLAB was used to simulate the suggested routing scheme. The outcomes showed that our suggested scheme holds promises for lowering overall latency and guaranteeing a functional CH, thus successful data delivery with minimal delays.