Scalable Topologies for Time-Optimal Authentication of UAV Swarms

Abstract

Swarm-based Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) applications require a large number of UAVs to be deployed across a region to work cooperatively. To operate a large number of unattended UAVs in hostile environments, it is critical to secure UAV-BS (base station) communications. UAV authentication based on Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) has recently emerged as a potential solution for overcoming adversarial attacks. The performance of PUF-based authentication protocols is strongly influenced by various factors, including the time required to generate the topology, the number of bottleneck connections, and the network's traffic load. This article investigates how the authentication time for a UAV swarm is affected by various factors such as the type of topology, number of UAVs in the swarm and the number of parallel connections.