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.

KEYWORDS:

• Cryptosystems
• FANET
• Key management
• Routing
• Security
• Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The author would like to express his heartfelt gratitude to the supervisor for his guidance and unwavering support during this research for his guidance and support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

M. Usha

M Usha is currently working as an assistant director cum HOD in MEASI Institute of Information Technology, Chennai. She has completed MCA and MPhil in computer science from Bharathidasan University, Trichy. She has also done her MTech (CIT) and PhD from Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, Tirunelveli. She has 21 years of teaching experience and she has published papers in network security in national and international journals and has presented in international conferences and seminars. Her area of interests include operating systems, artificial intelligence, machine learning, algorithms and ad-hoc networks especially FANET and underwater communication.

J. Sathiamoorthy

J Sathiamoorthy is currently working as an associate professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering in RMK Engineering College, Chennai. He has completed MTech (CIT) and PhD from Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu, India. He has over 18 years of teaching experience. He has published papers in network security in national and international journals and has presented in international conferences and seminars. He has published more than 20 research papers in reputed journals in the area of ad-hoc networks especially MANET, VANET, FANET, and underwater communication. He has acted as a reviewer in many reputed international journals. e-mail: [email protected]

A. Ahilan

A Ahilan received PhD from Anna University, India, and working as an associate professor in the Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering at PSN College of Engineering and Technology, India. His area of interest includes FPGA prototyping, computer vision, the internet of things, cloud computing in medical, biometrics, and automation applications. Served guest editor in several journals of Elsevier, Benthom, IGI publishers. Also have contributed original research articles in IEEE Transactions, SCI, SCIE, and Scopus indexed peer-review journals. He presented various international conference events like ASQED (Malaysia), ESREF (France). e-mail: [email protected]

T. Mahalingam

T Mahalingam is currently working as an associate professor in the Department of Information Technology, in RMK Engineering College, Chennai, India. His research interests include image processing, network security, IoT and serving as a reviewer of several international reputed journals. e-mail: [email protected]