Owing to the explosive expansion of wireless communication and networking technologies, cost-effective unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have recently emerged and soon they will occupy the major part of our sky. UAVs can be exploited to efficiently accomplish complex missions when cooperatively organized as an ad hoc network, thus creating the well-known flying ad hoc networks (FANETs). The establishment of such networks is not feasible without deploying an efficient networking model allowing a reliable exchange of information between UAVs. FANET inherits common features and characteristics from mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and their sub-classes, such as vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) and wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Unfortunately, UAVs are often deployed in the sky adopting a mobility model dictated by the nature of missions that they are expected to handle, and therefore, differentiate themselves from any traditional networks. Moreover, several flying constraints and the highly dynamic topology of FANETs make the design of routing protocols a complicated task. In this paper, a comprehensive survey is presented covering the architecture, the constraints, the mobility models, the routing techniques, and the simulation tools dedicated to FANETs. A classification, descriptions, and comparative studies of an important number of existing routing protocols dedicated to FANETs are detailed. Furthermore, the paper depicts future challenge perspectives, helping scientific researchers to discover some themes that have been addressed only ostensibly in the literature and need more investigation. The novelty of this survey is its uniqueness to provide a complete analysis of the major FANET routing protocols and to critically compare them according to different constraints based on crucial parameters, thus better presenting the state of the art of this specific area of research.

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Routing in Flying Ad Hoc Networks: Survey, Constraints, and Future Challenge Perspectives

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become increasingly important in assisting 5G and beyond 5G (B5G) mobile networks. Indeed, UAVs have all the potentials to both satisfy the ever-increasing mobile data demands of such mobile networks and provide ubiquitous connectivity to different kinds of wireless devices. However, the UAV assistance paradigm faces a set of crucial issues and challenges. For example, the network management of current UAV-assisted systems is time consuming, complicated, and carried out manually, thus causing a multitude of interoperability issues. To efficiently address all these issues, Software-Defined Network (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) are two promising technologies to efficiently manage and improve the UAV assistance for the next generation of mobile networks. In the literature, no clear guidelines are describing the different use cases of SDN and NFV in the context of UAV assistance to terrestrial networks, including mobile networks. Motivated by this fact, in this survey, we guide the reader through a comprehensive discussion of the main characteristics of SDN and NFV technologies. Moreover, we provide a thorough analysis of the different classifications, use cases, and challenges related to UAV-assisted systems. We then discuss SDN/NFV-enabled UAV-assisted systems, along with several case studies and issues, such as the involvement of UAVs in cellular communications, monitoring, and routing, to name a few. We furthermore present a set of open research challenges, high-level insights, and future research directions related to UAV-assisted systems.

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Softwarization of UAV Networks: A Survey of Applications and Future Trends

Unmanned aerial vehicle for internet of everything: Opportunities and challenges

Drone security is currently a major topic of discussion among researchers and industrialists. Although there are multiple applications of drones, if the security challenges are not anticipated and required architectural changes are not made, the upcoming drone applications will not be able to serve their actual purpose. Therefore, in this paper, we present a detailed review of the security-critical drone applications, and security-related challenges in drone communication such as DoS attacks, Man-in-the-middle attacks, De-Authentication attacks, and so on. Furthermore, as part of solution architectures, the use of Blockchain, Software Defined Networks (SDN), Machine Learning, and Fog/Edge computing are discussed as these are the most emerging technologies. Drones are highly resource-constrained devices and therefore it is not possible to deploy heavy security algorithms on board. Blockchain can be used to cryptographically store all the data that is sent to/from the drones, thereby saving it from tampering and eavesdropping. Various ML algorithms can be used to detect malicious drones in the network and to detect safe routes. Additionally, the SDN technology can be used to make the drone network reliable by allowing the controller to keep a close check on data traffic, and fog computing can be used to keep the computation capabilities closer to the drones without overloading them.

Fast, Reliable, and Secure Drone Communication: A Comprehensive Survey

Future FANET with application and enabling techniques: Anatomization and sustainability issues

Multi-Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) enabled Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) provide a wide range of applications, covering civilian and military expeditions along with geographical navigation, control, and reconnaissance. The coordinated networks formed between the UAVs and the WSNs help in enhancing the issues related to quality as well as coverage. The overall coverage issues result in starvation as an effect of long waiting time for the nodes, while forwarding the traffic. The coverage problem can be resolved by an intelligent choice of UAV way-points. Therefore, a specialized UAV mobility model is required which takes into account the topological structure as well as the importance of strategic locations to fix UAV way-points and decide the data transmission paradigm. To resolve this problem, a novel mobility model is proposed, which takes into account the attraction factor for setting up the way-points for UAV movements. The model is capable of deciding between the locations which result in more coverage, increased throughput with lesser number of UAVs employed, as justified by the simulation results and comparative evaluations.

An Efficient Mobility Model for Improving Transmissions in Multi-UAVs Enabled WSNs

Software Defined Network is an architecture that focuses on the separation of control plane and data plane in order to make networks programmable and scalable. Currently Openflow is the most widely used SDN protocol. It has provided flexibility to the networking environment and had made it simpler and easy to optimize. SDN is a major area of research however; in the current scenario the field of security is relatively under exploited. The paper describes an intrusion detection mechanism for Openflow based Software defined networks. The study focuses on developing a packet filtering firewall over a Software Defined Network controller namely Floodlight and the application of association rules to find the patterns among the data passing through the firewall. The patterns recorded serve as the motivation behind the development of an Anomaly based intrusion detection mechanism.

Intrusion detection system based on Software Defined Network firewall

Multi-UAV collaborative networks provide with the opportunity to exploit civil, chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and geographical reconnaissance, survey, management, and control. For the collaborative network formation, coverage is of prime paramountcy. Alongside coverage, possession of information and communication security is withal a major challenge. The coverage quandary can be resolved by a perspicacious selection of UAV waypoints. But the security paradigm which can be an effect of faulty node, intrusion or even choice of erroneous communication channels needs to be taken care of through efficacious strategies. Consequently, both a specialized UAV mobility model and a security mechanism are required in order to establish prosperous collaborative networks. In this article, an SDN-based secure mobility model is proposed which takes into account the topological density and restricts the UAV and ground node (Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs)) transmissions to authenticity. Significant gains are observed for throughput, coverage, and latency by establishing a simulated network between multiple UAVs and WSN motes.

An SDN-Based Secure Mobility Model for UAV-Ground Communications

Efficient data management and control over WSNs using SDN-enabled aerial networks

The article presents a throughput maximization approach for UAV assisted ground networks. Throughput maximization involves minimizing delay and packet loss through UAV trajectory optimization, reinforcing the congested nodes and transmission channels. The aggressive reinforcement policy is achieved by characterizing nodes, links, and overall topology through delay, loss, throughput, and distance. A position-aware graph neural network (GNN) is used for characterization, prediction, and dynamic UAV trajectory enhancement. To establish correctness, the proposed approach is validated against optimized link state routing (OLSR) driven UAV assisted ground networks. The proposed approach considerably outperforms the classical approach by demonstrating significant gains in throughput and packet delivery ratio with notable decrements in delay and packet loss. The performance analysis of the proposed approach against software-defined UAVs (U-S) and UAVs as base stations (U-B) verifies the consistency and gains in average throughput while minimizing delay and packet loss. The scalability test of the proposed approach is performed by varying data rates and the number of UAVs.

Mohd Abuzar Sayeed

Papers

An Efficient Mobility Model for Improving Transmissions in Multi-UAVs Enabled WSNs

Intrusion detection system based on Software Defined Network firewall

An SDN-Based Secure Mobility Model for UAV-Ground Communications

Efficient data management and control over WSNs using SDN-enabled aerial networks

Efficient Deployment with Throughput Maximization for UAVs Communication Networks.