PROPULSION AND STABILITY AWARE ROUTING PROTOCOL FOR SUSTAINABLE FLYING AD-HOC NETWORKS (SPARROW-EAR)

The limited battery capacity of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) remains a critical barrier to sustaining the operation of Flying Ad-Hoc Networks (FANETs), which enable coordinated aerial missions in surveillance, disaster management, and environmental monitoring. Traditional routing protocols emphasize connectivity and throughput but often neglect the dual challenges of propulsion-dominated energy consumption and mobility-induced link instability. This paper presents Propulsion and Stability-Aware Routing Protocol for Sustainable Flying Ad-Hoc Networks (SPARROW-EAR), also referred to as Sustainable Power-Aware Routing with Resilience and Opportunistic Weighting. The protocol integrates a propulsion-aware energy model, residual flight time estimation, and predictive link stability analysis into its routing process. A Pareto-optimized route discovery mechanism filters out non-viable paths early, while a composite route utility function jointly evaluates energy fairness, reliability, and stability. The opportunistic load-balancing mechanism distributes traffic across multiple stable routes, preventing concentrated relay usage and reducing premature energy depletion among UAVs. Simulation results, supported by controlled UAV testbed trials, show that SPARROW-EAR achieves consistently higher packet delivery ratios, reduces energy imbalance by nearly 40%, and extends the overall network lifetime by more than 30% compared with AODV, EMGR, and LSTDA. These performance gains demonstrate SPARROW-EAR's capability to maintain reliable communication and sustained energy efficiency in dense, high-mobility FANET deployments, positioning the protocol as a technically robust solution for mission-critical aerial networking scenarios.