Trusted Geographic Routing Protocol Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Network

Considering the problems of high mobility and abnormal nodes in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) communication, a Deep reinforcement learning based Trusted Geographic Routing protocol ( DTGR) is proposed. A trusted third party is introduced to provide the trust of nodes. The difference between theoretical delay and real delay, and packet loss ratio are used as evaluation factors of trust degree. Routing selection is modeled as the Markov Decision Process ( MDP). The state are constructed based on the neighbor nodes' geographic location, the trust degree and the topology information. Then the routing decision can be output through the Deep Q Network(DQN). The action-value is adjusted by combining trust in reward function, to guide nodes to select the optimal next- hop. The simulation results show that DTGR has a lower average end-to-end delay and higher packet delivery ratio compared with existing schemes in UAV Ad hoc NETwork (UANET) with abnormal nodes. Besides, DTGR can effectively implement route selection and ensure network performance when the number or proportion of abnormal nodes changes.