FANET Based Health Assistance Mechanism During Flood Situation

Abstract

Due to their ease of access and maneuverability within disaster-affected areas, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles have become vital in disaster management. To facilitate the coordination of flood-response and emergency medical missions, this paper focuses on data communication within Flying Adhoc Networks, a crucial component of UAV deployment. A comparison of three FANET routing protocols, AODV, DSDV and OLSR, is presented using the NS-3 simulator with a three-dimensional Gauss-Markov mobility model. The protocols are evaluated through controlled experiments on node density (5-25 UAVs), UAV speed (5-40 m/s), relay-UAV failures and transmission-range degradation, and under two composite flood scenarios, using packet delivery ratio, packet loss ratio, throughput, end-to-end delay and routing overhead. Every configuration was run ten times with independent seeds and reported as mean with 95% confidence intervals, and differences were tested with ANOVA and Tukey HSD. AODV achieved the highest packet delivery ratio and throughput in most conditions (significantly higher than at least one competitor in 16 of 18 conditions), for example 68.2% against 41.5% (DSDV) and 38.9% (OLSR) in the baseline scenario, but with the highest end-to-end delay. OLSR gave the lowest delay (about 1-7 ms) with a lower delivery ratio, and DSDV was competitive only at low mobility and in sparse networks, where differences were not statistically significant. The results indicate that no single protocol is best for all health-assistance traffic: reliability-oriented traffic favours AODV, whereas latency-critical alerts favour OLSR. The findings are simulation-based and the limitations for real flood deployments are discussed.