LITERATURE REVIEW ON AUTONOMOUS AIRBORNE COMMUNICATION NETWORKS FOR DATA EXCHANGE

Abstract: Flying ad hoc networks (FANETs) enable unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to exchange information without relying exclusively on fixed infrastructure. The literature identifies high mobility, rapidly changing topology, intermittent wireless links, routing overhead, energy constraints, reliability, and security as major airborne-network issues. This review synthesizes the literature supplied with the project together with additional verified studies on FANET routing, collaborative UAV communication, UAV-assisted mesh relaying, communication standardization, packet reliability, and recent routing taxonomies. The review compares architectural focus, routing strategy, reliability mechanisms, validation approach, and practical limitations. A recurring gap is identified between algorithms or simulation-based studies and lightweight embedded implementation. This gap is directly relevant to practical airborne communication systems using multi-hop forwarding, acknowledgement/retransmission, dynamic rerouting, node-failure handling, and network monitoring. The review establishes the research background and provides a basis for subsequent prototype validation.

Keywords: Airborne networks, dynamic routing, FANET, multi-hop networking, packet reliability, routing protocols, UAV communication, wireless mesh networks.