Secure and Decentralized Swarm Behavior with Autonomous Agents for Smart Cities

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), referenced as drones, have advanced to consumer adoption for hobby and business use. Drone applications, such as infrastructure technology, security mechanisms, and resource delivery, are just the starting point. More complex tasks are possible through the use of UAV swarms. These tasks increase the potential impacts that drones will have on smart cities, modern cities which have fully adopted technology in order to enhance daily operations as well as the welfare of it's citizens. Smart cities not only consist of static mesh networks of sensors, but can contain dynamic aspects as well including both ground and air based autonomous vehicles.Networked computational devices require paramount security to ensure the safety of a city. To accomplish such high levels of security, services rely on secure-by-design protocols, impervious to security threats. Given the large number of sensors, autonomous vehicles, and other advancements, smart cities necessitates this level of security. The SHARK protocol (Secure, Heterogeneous, Autonomous, and Rotational Knowledge for Swarms) ensures this kind of security by allowing for new applications for UAV swarm technology. Enabling drones to circle a target without a centralized control or selecting lead agents, the SHARKS protocol performs organized movement among agents without creating a central point for attackers to target. Through comparisons on the stability of the protocol in different settings, experiments demonstrate the efficiency and capacity of the SHARKS protocol.

Survey on Collaborative Smart Drones and Internet of Things for Improving Smartness of Smart Cities

“…A smart city is not only about connected IoT devices and vehicle mobility and their networks, but also contains dynamic aspects such as autonomous drones. The security of autonomous swarm drones when performing tasks over smart cities was discussed [39]. The authors of [39] proposed the SHARK protocol for secured autonomous and heterogeneous swarm drones for ensuring the security of swarm drone applications over smart cities.…”

Dummy-Based Approach for Protecting Mobile Agents Against Malicious Destination Machines

“…The importance of presenting an effective solution to ensure the integrity of the results is highlighted when an agent is used to perform sensitive tasks. For example, in smart cities, where ensuring safety is very important, smart warning systems (SWSs) are used to collect data about the bridges, cranes, and swings in kids' play areas, which are located in different locations of the smart city [17,18]. When using agents to migrate to DMs (computers connected to cameras) and a video magnification task [19,20,21] is assigned to the agents to check if the vibration of the items is normal or not, returning unmodified results is critical to the decisionmaking center taking proper corresponding steps.…”

Adversarial Impacts on Autonomous Decentralized Lightweight Swarms

“…Existing SHARKS-protocol research focused on decentralized navigation of drone swarms in smart city applications without the use of lead nodes in order to mitigate direct cybersecurity threats [1]. The original SHARKS protocol is described here for completeness,…”

“…The SHARKS protocol enables a swarm of agents to evenly disperse and then rotate around the target [1]. During a given computation round, agents move based on two rules related to the location of a target and the directional heading of their nearest neighbor.…”

“…A decentralized protocol, SHARKS (Secure, Heterogeneous, Autonomous, and Rotational Knowledge for Swarms), allows for any number of agents to circle around a target (in two dimensions) or ensphere a target (in three dimensions) [1]. SHARKS stabilizes quickly through a decentralized algorithm with two rules.…”