A Secure Framework for Flying AdHoc Networks

Abstract

The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has significantly increased for forming an ad hoc network due to their astonishing working capabilities in the tactical as well as civilian areas such as armed attacks, border surveillance, disaster management, rescue operation and transportation. These UAVs aided ad hoc networks popularly known as Flying Ad hoc Networks (FANETs). A FANET consist a group of homogeneous or heterogeneous flying agents called Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) connected by wireless links. UAVs are capable to communicate with each other in a group, and interact with their neighboring nodes to acquire valuable information. In FANETs, UAVs performs not only as a client, but also have the responsibility to perform as a router and server in the network. The large degree of freedom and self-organising capabilities makes FANETs totally different from any other network solution. FANETs can be rapidly deployed anytime in real-time for communication because they do not require any external resources. These unique features make FANETs a suitable solution for various applications. In FANETs, intermediate UAVs are responsible for forwarding the data packets of other network s UAVs and enable them to communicate out of their transmission range. In FANETs, UAVs are commonly constrained by limited energy and computation power. So, intermediate nodes can refuse to forward packets in order to preserve their resources, leads to disruption in network traffic. Nodes showing such behavior are known as selfish nodes. Selfishness is generally a passive behavior of the node, and effect the overall performance of the network by degrading it. FANETs are more prone to attacks due to the self-organized, anonymous, distributive and independent behavior of nodes.Trust management can be one of the security solutions for FANETs because to accomplish the task/mission with cooperation and coordination, nodes need to have trust on each other. Trust management schemes/techniques allowed a node to assess trustworthiness of other