SDN-driven Dynamic Deployment of IDS with Load Balancing for Drones in Emergency Scenarios

In this paper, the concept of dynamically deploying Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) over drones in emergency scenarios is explored by exploiting the modern new Software Defined Network (SDN) paradigm. During emergency situations, such as natural disasters or large-scale accidents, maintaining network security becomes crucial for efficient and reliable communication. Drones equipped with IDS can play a vital role in monitoring and protecting the communication infrastructure in such scenarios. The paper investigates a dynamic and time-sensitive deployment approach of IDS on a fleet of drones in order to provide a high degree of fault tolerance regarding network defense. Therefore, it proposes a load-balancing module on the SDN controller to equally distribute the network traffic to be analyzed by the IDS-enabled drones. The downtime period when deploying a new IDS on a drone along with CPU utilization and packet loss will be studied to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution.