Secure Ground Control Station-based Routing Protocol for UAV Networks

This paper presents a secured routing protocol between ground control station and an unmanned aerial vehicles network that utilizes the Flying Ad Hoc Network (FANET) technology. It uses a hybrid authentication scheme to ensure the integrity between the communication link that is a combination of the symmetric scheme which encrypts the routing messages with digital signatures and the asymmetric mechanism create a secure connection between aerial vehicles(UAV) and ground control station (GCS), as well as between the UAVs itself. The UAV should register first to join the network. In the registration process, the key distribution center is used to provide the public and private keys to each node that wants to join the network. Furthermore, the TWINE algorithm is used to secure the important message related to routing. The proposed routing protocol uses packet leash mechanism to prevent from wormhole attack. The simulation results show the proposed routing protocol can maintain the network performance in terms of packet delivery ratio and network overhead even when there is an attacker appeared during the communication.