Redundant Weighted Clustering Scheme for Critical S-UAVs Infrastructures

A swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is a wireless network made up of UAVs cooperating to upload data to the internet. During critical scenarios like earthquakes, one or more UAV could get damaged. Clustering is one of the most dependable routing systems since the network is divided into clusters with a cluster head (CH) and cluster members (CM). Having a damaged CH results in a disconnected cluster and loss of valuable data. Ensuring a functional CH is a crucial topic that is rarely covered in routing schemes. Our proposed scheme targets ensuring a functional CH through multiple redundancies while redeucing the delays. This paper suggests an enhanced redundant routing scheme based on three weighted parameters, which are the distance stability, the rewarding stability, and the energy stability. The weighted calculation will result in a new metric named cluster index which will be utilized in CH and CMs selection. To guarantee connection stability, whenever the primary CH is not operating, a redundant CH handles the routing responsibilities. The proposed protocol was simulated using MATLAB. The results obtained demonstrated that our proposed scheme is promising in optimizing the cluster formation while reducing total delays and ensuring a functional CH and data delivery.