FANET Mesh Routing Workbench

Watch a mobile drone mesh choose relays, repair routes, and fail safely when the fleet partitions

Interactive FANET animation showing air-to-air and air-to-ground links, dynamic topology changes, relay selection, route repair, packet forwarding, and the trade-offs between direct and mesh routing in a mobile UAV network.

FANET Air-to-air mesh Mobility routing

FANET mesh routing workbench

Move a packet from a drone to a ground station while radio range, mobility, and routing policy change the mesh. The goal is to see when multi-hop relays help, when direct links fail, and when a partition leaves no safe route.

E-C-A-Gselected route

8 linksusable radio links

72%weakest route link

deliveredpacket outcome

Mission Scenario

Routing Controls

Routing policy link-quality mesh Link-quality mesh Shortest-hop mesh Direct A2G only

Radio range 285 m

Mobility speed 18 m/s

Ready: inspect neighbor discovery

Watch For

FANET mesh links are useful only while enough drones stay in range and a route reaches the ground station.

A2A linksDrone-to-drone relays create multi-hop paths.

A2G gatewayThe final hop must reach a ground station or airborne backhaul.

Weakest hopOne fragile link can dominate delivery risk.

Route repairMobility can force a new path or expose a partition.

Mobile FANET Topology

Neighbor discovery

1. Discoverhello beacons

2. Scorerank links

3. Forwardpacket waits

4. Repairmonitor mobility

Route Readouts

E-C-A-Gpacket path

3 hopsrelay count and path stretch

72% weakestminimum link quality on route

medium overheadbeacon and route maintenance load

8 usable linksradio edges in current frame

deliveredcurrent packet state

Diagnosis

Step Transcript

Quick Reference

FANETA Flying Ad Hoc Network is a mobile ad hoc network formed by UAVs. It usually has faster topology change and sparser node density than many ground MANET examples.

A2A and A2GAir-to-air links connect drones to relays. Air-to-ground links connect a drone to the ground station, controller, or backhaul gateway.

Mesh trade-offMesh adds reach and redundancy, but it also adds control traffic, relay energy use, path stretch, and stale-route risk.

How To Read The Animation

Gray links are in range but not used by the selected path. Colored links show link quality: green is strong, amber is marginal, and red-orange is fragile. The thick teal path is the route selected by the current routing policy.

The radio range slider changes which neighbors are reachable. The mobility slider does not model a specific airframe; it increases drift between steps and reduces link-stability confidence to show why FANET routes need faster repair than static mesh networks.

Technical Accuracy Notes

This is a conceptual routing model, not a full RF propagation or UAV flight simulator. Link quality is a teaching score based on distance, altitude separation, and mobility stress. Real FANET designs also depend on antenna pattern, frequency, transmit power, airframe attitude, interference, MAC behavior, regulatory limits, and protocol choice.

Direct air-to-ground routing can be simple when every drone reaches the ground station. A mesh route is useful when the source cannot reach the ground directly, but it is not automatically better: more hops add latency, relay energy cost, and route maintenance overhead.