Establishment of FANETs Using IoT-Based UAV and Its Issues Related to Mobility and Authentication

Introduction

Basically, wireless networks are categorised into infrastructure-based and infrastructure-less networks. To avoid the limitations and challenges faced by infrastructure-based networks related to range and other support constraints, the concept of UAV came to exist which works as same as ad hoc fashion and support to form a network known to be FANET (Lakew et al., 2020). Flying Ad-Hoc Networks (FANETs) are the networks formed with the nodes that support high mobility in air and the network formation is adopted from the existing ad hoc networking structure. The devices participating in the network formations are usually known to be unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the form of drones which are known to be a form of Internet of Things (IoT) device. Due to the advancement in the field of electronic, sensor and communication technologies, the design of IoT based UAV systems are playing their roles in various fields. These IoT based UAV can fly unconventionally as well as function remotely without need for any human intervention. Because of features like versatility, flexibility, easy installation and relatively small operating expenses, the usage of UAVs promises new ways for both military and civilian applications, such as search and destroy operations, border surveillance, disaster monitoring, remote sensing, and traffic monitoring etc. Nowadays multi-UAV are used for performing tasks like monitoring and have the capability to work in the corporate fashion (Bekmezci et al., 2013). The figure 1 shows the transformation of MANET to VANET and to the existing FANET.

Figure 1.

Adaptation of MANET towards VANET to FANET

The advantages of the multi-UAV systems can be summarized as follows:

• •

  Cost: The acquisition and maintenance cost of small UAVs is much lower than the cost.

• •

  Scalability: Easy to add up the UAV thereby enables increased coverage ease of operation.

• •

  Survivability: Even if any one of the participating UAV fails to operate the other available UAV does the operation of the down UAV.

• •

  Speed-up: The focused missions can be completed faster with a higher number of UAVs.

• •

  Small radar cross-section: Instead of one large radar cross-section, multi-UAV systems produce very small radar cross-sections, which is crucial for military applications

Despite these idiosyncratic traits, they brand the FANETs as a suitable resolution for diverse circumstances, but still the issues related to communications and networking of the multiple UAVs need to be focused (Bekmezci et al., 2013).