Edinburgh Napier University

  The number of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) applications has increased over the past few years. Among all scenarios, UAV group consisting multi-UAVs is normally used to provide extensible communications. As a networking solution, Flying Ad Hoc Networks (FANETs) routing with ideal routing performance is the prerequisite of the multi-UAV application. Regarding the high construction cost of devices for FANETs, it is infeasible to build the real experimental environment, hundreds of UAVs are needed. In this case, network simulation is the most common mean to study FANETs in most cases. For FANETs, the mobility of UAV nodes has an important impact on the simulation results. Thus, a mobility model which can fit into specific environments well is necessary. Traditional mobility models of FANETs are mainly designed for planar scenarios without considering the actual application of FANETs which is three-dimensional (3D). Therefore, in this paper, firstly, the characteristics of UAVs is analyzed and then the key points of 3D mobility model for FANETs are presented. In this context, we propose a 3D Smooth Random Walk (3DSRW) mobility model, which intends to mimic the mobility of UAVs to the greatest extent. Then, we conduct simulations to get the network performance of AODV to verify the performance gap between 2D and 3D environment, in order to demonstrate the validity of our proposal. To further present the usage of our proposal, we show the performance of four routing protocols, including AODV, DSDV, OLSR and GPSR under the 3DSRW-constucted 3D environment, and analyzed their applicability in 3D environment.