SWEEPER: Secure Waterfall Energy-Efficient Protocol-Enabled Routing in FANET

Abstract

The recent advancements in ad-hoc networks have resulted in innovations like FANETs. FANETs (Flying Ad hoc Networks) have become diversified in its applications ranging from agriculture, military, emergency services etc. The FANET environment needs to be dynamic and is populated by UAVs. The highly mobile UAVs are responsible for data transmission between nodes. If unchecked, this results in packet loss. Reliable data transmission in FANETs is possible, if effective routing protocols are in place. In this research, a Secure Waterfall Energy-Efficient Protocol-Enabled Routing (SWEEPER) has been proposed which helps conserve the node energy throughout the transmission process. The framework uses a waterfall model approach which includes group key management as an underlying process governing the security aspect of the protocol. Asymmetric key cryptography is applied to our technique, which involves two unique nodes, labeled the Computed Key (CKey) and the Dissemination Key (DKey). The two nodes will generate, verify, and distribute the secret keys. This will help other nodes concentrate on transmission alone and needn’t waste time in computational activities or key handling. Security breaches and malignant nodes are also handled efficiently. The nodes along the route are selected based on a trust factor, which allows our protocol to select only genuine nodes to forward packets along the discovered path. Our work is analyzed with existing protocols of FANETS like SecRIP and MDRMA. The analysis reveals that our protocol outperforms the existing protocols in terms of minimal delay, maximum energy conservation and PDR, which contributes towards a maximized throughput.