Distributed multi-objective consumer-centric routing for LoRa-based IoT-enabled FANET

LoRa-enabled Flying Ad Hoc Networks (FANETs) offer long-range and energy-efficient connectivity for next-generation IoT and post-disaster communication infrastructures, yet their performance is fundamentally constrained by limited bandwidth, dynamic topologies, and uneven energy depletion across aerial nodes. This work develops a distributed consumer-centric multi-objective routing framework (Proposed-CCR) that jointly optimizes residual energy, link quality, and flow-level priority through a lightweight utility-driven forwarding mechanism. The design integrates composite cost modeling, two-hop neighbor awareness, adaptive path monitoring, and local repair to ensure scalable, resilient, and delay-aware multi-hop communication. Extensive simulations demonstrate that Proposed-CCR reduces per-packet energy consumption by 28–35%, extends network lifetime by over 35%, and decreases high-priority flow delay by nearly 40% relative to state-of-the-art schemes including MinHop, ACOR, GCCR, and BBCCR. These results confirm the effectiveness of a consumer-centric, LoRa-aware multi-objective heuristic for UAV-IoT integration and emergency communication scenarios, while highlighting practical opportunities for sustainable and resource-efficient airborne networking architectures.