Secure and Decentralized Swarm Behavior with Autonomous Agents for Smart Cities

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), referenced as drones, have advanced to consumer adoption for hobby and business use. Due to this increased availability in drone technology other sectors of the economy such as infrastructure technology, security mechanisms, and resource deliveries have begun to implement drones in their own operations. Following the consumer and private sectors demand for better iterations of the product, increasingly more complex tasks will become possible due to the advances in hardware. These tasks increase the potential impacts that drones will have on applications such as smart cities, modern cities which have fully adopted technology in order to enhance daily operations as well as the welfare of its citizens. These cities are being designed to consist of mostly static mesh networks of sensors, but can contain dynamic aspects as well, including both ground and air-based autonomous vehicles.When devising networked computation devices for use in a smart city, safety should be of paramount concern. In an attempt to meet these high standards of security, services and devices should be implemented with security protocols in mind during every stage of development. Given the large number of sensors, autonomous vehicles, and other advancements, a smart city necessitates this level of security. The SHARKS protocol (Secure, Heterogeneous, Autonomous, and Rotational Knowledge for Swarms) ensures this kind of security by allowing for new applications for UAV swarm technology. Enabling drones to circle a target without centralized control or selecting lead agents, the SHARKS protocol performs organized movement among agents without creating a central point of vulnerability. Through comparisons on the stability of the protocol in different settings, experiments demonstrate the efficiency and capacity of the SHARKS protocol as a potential solution for future smart cities.