A secure communication framework for large-scale unmanned aircraft systems

Abstract

The application areas for Unmanned Aircraft (UA) Systems (UAS) are constantly expanding. Aside from providing an attractive alternative in applications that are risky for humans, smaller UAS become highly attractive for applications where use of larger aircraft is not practical. This paper presents the UAS Collaboration Wireless Network (UAS-CWN), a secure and reliable UAS communication mesh-network. This solution is proposed for the circumstances where a large number of UAS are deployed to cooperatively accomplish a mission such as surveillance in hostile environments. The proposed UAS-CWN system provides high fault-tolerance through use of information dispersal algorithm and meanwhile reduces the risk of information exposure to the adversaries via security-enhancing mechanisms. Our evaluation shows promising results. Especially, a UAS-CWN with high security-level settings can withstand losing 30% of the total number of unmaned aircrafts while steadily achieving above 96% data recovery rate.