Efficient Security Scheme for Disaster Surveillance UAV Communication Networks

Abstract

The Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) play a significant role to alleviate the negative impacts of disasters by providing essential assistance to the rescue and evacuation operations in the affected areas. Then, the reliability of UAV connections and the accuracy of exchanged information are critical parameters. In this paper, we propose networking and security architecture for disaster surveillance UAV system. The networking scheme involves a two-tier cluster network based on IEEE 802.11ah, which can provide traffic isolation between the tiers. The security scheme guarantees the accuracy and availability of the collected information from the disaster area applying fingerprint features and data redundancy techniques; the proposed scheme also utilizes the lightweight Ring-Learning with Errors (Ring-LWE) crypto-system to assure the confidentiality of the transmitted data with low overhead. IntroductionUnmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) [1,2] have many military and civilian applications, such as border surveillance, public safety and transportation management. Mainly, UAVs are crucial for rescue and recovery operations during disasters, such as volcanoes and earthquakes, especially when the regular communication networks in the area are partially or completely destroyed. In addition to collecting information about the disaster, UAVs can carry equipment, i.e., medical aids, to the disaster area without involving humans. Other applications for UAV networks could be monitoring the effect of rocket launch operation on the surrounding area [3], preserving public safety during terrorist attacks or natural disasters using 4G [4] or satellite communications [5], prompting the smart farming [6], or utilized in IoT aerial sensing [7].The UAV system could consist of one large drone, as is often the case in military missions, or a group of small drones that are usually cooperating to complete one task, such as traffic monitoring or forest surveillance. Using a swarm of small drones instead of single large drone brings higher system reliability and scalability, but it also introduces additional issues related to management of system components and functions; in particular, it requires the following:1. Central ground substation (CS) which collects data from relaying drones. 2. Clusters of drones participating in the same application that perform some kind of surveillance/sensing application. 3. Cluster head drone(s) in each cluster have two main functions. Firstly, they keep administrative membership data for the cluster. Secondly, they collect sensed data perform data fusion, integrity and confidentiality. Due to a large distance between cluster head(s) and central substation (CS), cluster head(s) do not send data directly to it. Instead, cluster head(s) transmits the data to relay Information 2019, 10, 43 2 of 22drones. Please note that it is also possible that each node in the cluster can communicate with the relay node and that a single or a few nodes keep administrative functions. 4. Relay drones which need to leave the cluster a...

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