Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) Communication and Networking

A special issue of Electronics (ISSN 2079-9292). This special issue belongs to the section "Networks".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 September 2024 | Viewed by 3295

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
School of Cyber Engineering, Xidian University, Xi'an 710071, China
Interests: UAV cybersecurity; artificial intelligence system security
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
College of Cyber Security, Jinan University, Guangzhou 510632, China
Interests: telematics security; drone security; web security; trust and privacy; artificial intelligence; blockchain
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
College of Cyber Security, Jinan University, Guangzhou 510632, China
Interests: cyberspace security; AI security; vulnerabilities and threats; cyber intelligence attack and defense; industrial internet security

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have enormous potential in the public and civil domains. These are particularly useful in applications where human lives would otherwise be endangered. Multi-UAV systems can collaboratively complete missions more efficiently and economically compared to single UAV systems. Despite the advantages provided by UAVs in various sectors, they face several challenges in routing, energy conservation, and security. Routing demands of UAV networks go beyond the needs of MANETs and VANETs. Protocols are required that would adapt to high mobility, dynamic topology, intermittent links, power constraints, and changing link quality. Due to the limited energy supply of UAVs, protocols at each layer should contribute toward the greening of the network. In addition, the unstructured deployment with wireless and dynamic communication means that UAVs are exposed to various security threats, meaning that security, privacy, and trust management are the key challenges to tackle.

This Special Issue aims to publish the latest contributions in the development of methods and mechanisms for energy-efficient reliable UAV networks. Researchers, developers, and industry practitioners working in this area are invited to present their views on the current trends, challenges, and state-of-the-art solutions of UAV Networks, addressing various issues including routing, energy conservation, security, and so on. Due to the complex and dynamic environment that the UAVs operate in, the use of intelligent algorithms, e.g., machine learning/deep learning techniques in optimizing proposed solutions are of high relevance to the Special Issue.

Dr. Jingjing Guo
Dr. Zhiquan Liu
Dr. Linfeng Wei
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • UAV networks
  • routing protocols
  • energy conservation
  • security
  • privacy
  • trust

Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

15 pages, 660 KiB  
Article
Attribute-Based Proxy Signature Scheme Supporting Flexible Threshold Predicate for UAV Networks
by Lei He, Yong Gan and Yanhua Zhang
Electronics 2023, 12(23), 4854; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics12234854 - 30 Nov 2023
Viewed by 681
Abstract
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is an attractive application because of its flexibility and economy. It may use a digital signature scheme to protect commands sent to UAVs. Moreover, the digital signature scheme should guarantee the real-time performance of UAVs executing commands and protect [...] Read more.
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is an attractive application because of its flexibility and economy. It may use a digital signature scheme to protect commands sent to UAVs. Moreover, the digital signature scheme should guarantee the real-time performance of UAVs executing commands and protect the signer’s privacy. Therefore, we proposed an attribute-based proxy signature (ABPS) scheme supporting flexible threshold predicate for UAV networks and proved its security. It has existential unforgeability under selective-predicate and chosen message attacks (EUF-sP-CMA) and can protect the signer’s privacy. We analyzed its computation costs based on experimental data and communication costs. The analysis results indicate that our ABPS scheme has less computation costs than other ABPS schemes and is at the same level as other ABPS schemes on communication costs. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) Communication and Networking)
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18 pages, 1214 KiB  
Article
Privacy-Preserving Attestation Scheme for Revocable UAV Charging Using Hybrid State Channels
by Xuedan Jia, Xiangmei Song and Chuntang Yu
Electronics 2023, 12(19), 3998; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics12193998 - 22 Sep 2023
Viewed by 609
Abstract
Although widely applied in varied scenarios, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) suffer severe flight time and flight range limitations due to constrained onboard battery capacity, causing frequent battery recharging when performing persistent missions. The wireless power transfer technology is a promising solution for UAV [...] Read more.
Although widely applied in varied scenarios, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) suffer severe flight time and flight range limitations due to constrained onboard battery capacity, causing frequent battery recharging when performing persistent missions. The wireless power transfer technology is a promising solution for UAV charging by utilizing unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) equipped with wireless charging facilities, where charging time slots are auctioned and assigned to UAVs. However, UGVs themselves also have limited energy capacity, resulting in the need to revoke a UAV charging transaction after auction to satisfy their own demand if necessary. In addition, as UAVs and UGVs are mutually distrustful, inherent security and privacy concerns must be resolved during the revocation. In this paper, we resort to blockchain technology for secure and efficient revocable charging in vehicle-assisted wireless UAV networks. We present PAS, an efficient privacy-preserving attestation scheme for revocable UAV charging based on hybrid state channels, where UAVs and UGVs perform off-chain operations as blockchain users for privacy and efficiency, while security and fairness are guaranteed by the on-chain mechanism. PAS consists of a multi-party state channel and multiple two-party state channels responsible for charging scheduling and transaction revocation, respectively. PAS ensures fair and private revocation negotiation and compensation in a trust-free manner by developing a set of carefully designed modular protocols. We provide PAS’ constituent primitives in detail, prove its security properties following the universally composable (UC) framework, and present experimental results to demonstrate its feasibility and scalability. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) Communication and Networking)
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18 pages, 3463 KiB  
Article
A Collaborative Path Planning Method for Intelligent Agricultural Machinery Based on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
by Min Shi, Xia Feng, Senshan Pan, Xiangmei Song and Linghui Jiang
Electronics 2023, 12(15), 3232; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics12153232 - 26 Jul 2023
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 1141
Abstract
The development of agricultural farming has evolved from traditional agricultural machinery due to its efficiency and autonomy. Intelligent agricultural machinery is capable of autonomous driving and remote control, but due to its limited perception of farmland and field obstacles, the assistance of unmanned [...] Read more.
The development of agricultural farming has evolved from traditional agricultural machinery due to its efficiency and autonomy. Intelligent agricultural machinery is capable of autonomous driving and remote control, but due to its limited perception of farmland and field obstacles, the assistance of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is required. Although existing intelligent systems have greater advantages than traditional agricultural machinery in improving the quality of operations and reducing labor costs, they also produce complex operational planning problems. Especially as agricultural products and fields become more diversified, it is necessary to develop an adaptive operation planning method that takes into account the efficiency and quality of work. However, the existing operation planning methods lack practicality and do not guarantee global optimization because traditional planners only consider the path commands and generate the path in the rectangular field without considering other factors. To overcome these drawbacks, this paper proposes a novel and practical collaborative path planning method for intelligent agricultural machinery based on unmanned aerial vehicles. First, we utilize UAVs for obstacle detection. With the field information and operation data preprocessed, automatic agricultural machinery could be assisted in avoiding obstacles in the field. Second, by considering both the historical state of the current operation and the statistics from previous operations, the real-time control of agricultural machinery is determined. Therefore, the K-means algorithm is used to extract key control parameters and discretize the state space of agricultural machinery. Finally, the dynamic operation plan is established based on the Markov chain. This plan can estimate the probability of agricultural machinery transitioning from one state to another by analyzing data, thereby dynamically determining real-time control strategies. The field test with an automatic tractor shows that the operation planner can achieve higher performance than the other two popular methods. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) Communication and Networking)
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