Formal Analysis of k-Resiliency for Collaborative UAVs

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are growingly used in different aspects of our lives. As the cost of UAVs is decreasing with novel technologies, their popularity is increasing rapidly in surveillance, disaster management, agriculture, military operations, etc. The recent trend of collaborative operations of a network of UAVs to achieve a common objective has attracted the researchers as well as commercial vendors. It has revolutionized the means of data collection to maximize mission performances. However, the collaborative UAVs, with respect to the mission objective, need to be resilient to the unavailability of one or more UAVs that can be caused due to cyberattacks or technical failures. As UAVs can easily be targeted by adversaries, these devices need to maintain safe communication with each other while avoiding fuel outage and mid-air collisions, thus reducing the possibilities of being hacked but remain undetected. In this work, we present a formal framework that takes different UAV parameters in a UAV network, resiliency requirements, and resource constraints as the input, and verifies for the resiliency threats. Each threat specifies if k or less number of UAVs fail, whether the rest of the network still can maintain successful communication. We illustrate the execution of this framework with an example case study. We evaluate the proposed framework to demonstrate the relationships between different parameters of a network and its resiliency. We also evaluate the framework in terms of the resiliency analysis performance and scalability.