ENSING: Energy saving based data transmission in Internet of Drones for 3D connectivity in 6G networks

The Internet of Drones represents an emerging framework with a plethora of applications in the context of Beyond-5G networks. Drone technology uses are spreading from commercial, industrial up to military applications. Drones, a.k.a. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), are largely adopted in all those fields where men cannot reach or are unable to perform in a timely and efficient manner. Communications among UAVs are important to allow task coordination and network organization. However, as a drawback, UAVs are strongly affected by energy consumption that limits their flight and task accomplishment. In this paper, we address the energy consumption issue in UAV swarms and present a novel routing approach, namely ENSING, that aims to save energy consumption. Differently from previous approaches that simply reduce the number of control packets to save UAV battery level, ENSING approach selects the next-hop UAV forwarder according to energy constraints. In this way, only eligible UAVs with acceptable energy requirements can be selected in the packet forwarding, thus avoiding the involvement of those UAVs with limited battery level. Compared to other routing techniques, ENSING exhibits better performance in terms of packet delivery rate, throughput and latency.