Performance Evaluation for Tracking a Malicious UAV using an Autonomous UAV Swarm

Recent instances of malicious Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) causing service disruption or damage to critical infrastructure has prompted research into methods of mitigating and deterring such nefarious activities. One such countermeasure is to use a swarm of UAVs to track the malicious UAV back to its origin. In this paper, we evaluate different methods of swarm formation for the purposes of malicious UAV tracking via a bespoke OMNeT++ simulation. The simulation also evaluates the effect of the number of UAVs in the swarm, as well as the evasiveness of the malicious UAV in terms of its flight capabilities and flight path. The results demonstrate that encirclement type swarm formations such as Surround and Cone, in which the malicious UAV is surrounded by the swarm, perform better than a follow type swarm formation in their ability to continue to track the malicious UAV.