During the previous decades, the advanced technologies such as unman aerial vehicle(UAV) and directional antennas in airborne networks has developed rapidly. However there is limited research on the networking protocols for airborne network considering the hybrid and complicated network topology and situations. During my PhD study, my research mainly targets the different routing protocols for hierarchical airborne networks. Also in order to test the performance of our proposed networking protocols, a directional wireless mesh network (WMN) testbed is designed and set up to study the protocols in routing layer and data link layer with the support of directional antennas. In Chapter 1, I will briefly introduce the basic concepts and background which may be related to my research. Especially, the key point is the hybrid and hierarchical network topology and the novel technologies for advanced antennas for airborne networks. In Chapter 2, I work on designing a hybrid two-layer routing protocol for a hierarchical airborne network. This hybrid routing protocol is proposed to achieve better performance such as throughput and end-to-to delay for the complicated network topology and situation in mobile airborne networks. The ideas for this proposal are inspired by biological structure and pattern such as neural networks. Based on these innovative ideas, a two-layer routing protocol is used to deal with the hierarchical topology in airborne networks. In the high layer, a multi-path routing protocol is proposed to exploit the benefits of multi-beam directional antennas. And in the low layer, in order to handle the singular mobility of the sink node, a hybrid routing protocol is applied which consists of three sections using different protocols such as static path, AODV and gradient routing. Finally a cross-layer protocol is proposed to coordinate the data transfer between the previous two layers. In Chapter 3, we design and develop a WMN testbed equipped with directional antennas to test the performance for real-time multi-media communication. Also mesh protocols such as OLSR and Batman-adv are set up in this testbed as routing protocols. Different network topology with directional antennas are implemented and hardware demos are conducted in this testbed to study the performance and functions of the previous routing protocols in mesh network. Also in order to study the data link layer, we do research on the wireless mac driver and modify the source code to study the influence in the overall network performance. And cross-compilation is implemented to install and update the kernel modules related to mac drivers in the embedded system. In Chapter 4, we target an innovative routing protocol with a new concept of low probability of detection (LPD) for covert communication. In covert communication, there are other requirements and limitations about power control and route selection besides basic policies for routing protocols. Thus in our research, a power control algorithm is considered to lower the probability of detection by the adversary in the airborne networks. Also directional antennas are used to exploit the benefit of long transmission range to further decrease the probability of detection by converging the signals within a limited coverage. Also considering the moving model of the potential adversary, a shortcut algorithm for routing update is proposed to deal with the influence in routing selection because of the random movement of the adversary. Finally a novel routing protocol is proposed for the network equipped with directional antennas under the threaten of a potential adversary. In Chapter 5, we make the conclusion about the research on routing protocols and WMN testbed. We summarized the research during the PhD study and the future work I will continue.