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Electronics
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Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) Communication and Networking
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Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) Communication and Networking

A special issue of Electronics (ISSN 2079-9292). This special issue belongs to the section "Networks".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 February 2025 | Viewed by 6586

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Jingjing Guo

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
School of Cyber Engineering, Xidian University, Xi'an 710071, China
Interests: UAV cybersecurity; artificial intelligence system security
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Dr. Zhiquan Liu

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
College of Cyber Security, Jinan University, Guangzhou 510632, China
Interests: telematics security; drone security; web security; trust and privacy; artificial intelligence; blockchain
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Dr. Linfeng Wei

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
College of Cyber Security, Jinan University, Guangzhou 510632, China
Interests: cyberspace security; AI security; vulnerabilities and threats; cyber intelligence attack and defense; industrial internet security

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have enormous potential in the public and civil domains. These are particularly useful in applications where human lives would otherwise be endangered. Multi-UAV systems can collaboratively complete missions more efficiently and economically compared to single UAV systems. Despite the advantages provided by UAVs in various sectors, they face several challenges in routing, energy conservation, and security. Routing demands of UAV networks go beyond the needs of MANETs and VANETs. Protocols are required that would adapt to high mobility, dynamic topology, intermittent links, power constraints, and changing link quality. Due to the limited energy supply of UAVs, protocols at each layer should contribute toward the greening of the network. In addition, the unstructured deployment with wireless and dynamic communication means that UAVs are exposed to various security threats, meaning that security, privacy, and trust management are the key challenges to tackle.

This Special Issue aims to publish the latest contributions in the development of methods and mechanisms for energy-efficient reliable UAV networks. Researchers, developers, and industry practitioners working in this area are invited to present their views on the current trends, challenges, and state-of-the-art solutions of UAV Networks, addressing various issues including routing, energy conservation, security, and so on. Due to the complex and dynamic environment that the UAVs operate in, the use of intelligent algorithms, e.g., machine learning/deep learning techniques in optimizing proposed solutions are of high relevance to the Special Issue.

Dr. Jingjing Guo
Dr. Zhiquan Liu
Dr. Linfeng Wei
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Electronics is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • UAV networks
  • routing protocols
  • energy conservation
  • security
  • privacy
  • trust

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Published Papers (5 papers)

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Research

25 pages, 2303 KiB  
Article
Unlinkable and Revocable Signcryption Scheme for VANETs
by Lihui Li, Dongmei Chen, Yining Liu, Yangfan Liang, Yujue Wang and Xianglin Wu
Electronics 2024, 13(16), 3164; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics13163164 - 10 Aug 2024
Viewed by 702
Abstract
Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) can significantly improve the level of urban traffic management. However, the sender unlinkability has become an intricate issue in the field of VANETs’ encryption. As the sender signcrypts a message, the receiver has to use the sender’s identity or [...] Read more.
Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) can significantly improve the level of urban traffic management. However, the sender unlinkability has become an intricate issue in the field of VANETs’ encryption. As the sender signcrypts a message, the receiver has to use the sender’s identity or public key to decrypt it. Consequently, the sender can be traced using the same identity or public key, which poses some security risks to the sender. To address this issue, we present an unlinkable and revocable signcryption scheme (URSCS), where an efficient and powerful signcryption mechanism is adopted for communication. The sender constructs a polynomial to generate a unique session key for each communication, which is then transmitted to a group of receivers, enabling the same secret message to be sent to multiple receivers. Each time a secret message is sent, a new key pair is generated, and an anonymization mechanism is introduced to conceal the true identity of the vehicle, thus preventing malicious attackers from tracing the sender through the public key or the real identity. With the introduction of the identification public key, this scheme supports either multiple receivers or a single receiver, where the receiver can be either road side units (RSUs) or vehicles. Additionally, a complete revocation mechanism is constructed with extremely low communication overhead, utilizing the Chinese remainder theorem (CRT). Formal and informal security analyses demonstrate that our URSCS scheme meets the expected security and privacy requirements of VANETs. The performance analysis shows that our URSCS scheme outperforms other represented schemes. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) Communication and Networking)
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23 pages, 1699 KiB  
Article
A Privacy-Preserving V2I Fast Authentication Scheme in VANETs
by Yusheng Gan, Xiaolan Xie and Yining Liu
Electronics 2024, 13(12), 2369; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics13122369 - 17 Jun 2024
Viewed by 1050
Abstract
Due to the characteristics of high-speed movement of vehicles, authentication between vehicles and roadside units (RSUs) needs to be performed quickly. Vehicles can obtain the authentication information of the relevant RSUs from the certification authority (CA) in advance through route planning. Fast authentication [...] Read more.
Due to the characteristics of high-speed movement of vehicles, authentication between vehicles and roadside units (RSUs) needs to be performed quickly. Vehicles can obtain the authentication information of the relevant RSUs from the certification authority (CA) in advance through route planning. Fast authentication can be performed when the vehicle enters the RSU range. However, in most of the current vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) fast authentication schemes, when the vehicle requests the authentication information of an RSU from the CA, the vehicle often needs to provide the CA with the travel path information, which leads to the CA easily obtaining the travel path of the vehicle. In addition, the CA encrypts the private keys of RSUs and sends them to vehicles as authentication keys, and the vehicles can obtain the private key information of RSUs directly after decryption. Once the private keys of RSUs are leaked, vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) can be attacked by malicious access. In order to protect the confidentiality of RSU private keys and the route privacy of vehicles, we propose a privacy-preserving V2I fast authentication scheme in VANETs. The scheme realizes the confidentiality of RSU private keys and the route privacy protection of vehicles by improving the oblivious transfer (OT) algorithm. Security analysis proves that our scheme has good privacy and attack resistance. Finally, performance evaluation shows that the proposed scheme performs better in terms of computational overhead and communication overhead compared to related schemes. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) Communication and Networking)
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15 pages, 660 KiB  
Article
Attribute-Based Proxy Signature Scheme Supporting Flexible Threshold Predicate for UAV Networks
by Lei He, Yong Gan and Yanhua Zhang
Electronics 2023, 12(23), 4854; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics12234854 - 30 Nov 2023
Viewed by 989
Abstract
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is an attractive application because of its flexibility and economy. It may use a digital signature scheme to protect commands sent to UAVs. Moreover, the digital signature scheme should guarantee the real-time performance of UAVs executing commands and protect [...] Read more.
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is an attractive application because of its flexibility and economy. It may use a digital signature scheme to protect commands sent to UAVs. Moreover, the digital signature scheme should guarantee the real-time performance of UAVs executing commands and protect the signer’s privacy. Therefore, we proposed an attribute-based proxy signature (ABPS) scheme supporting flexible threshold predicate for UAV networks and proved its security. It has existential unforgeability under selective-predicate and chosen message attacks (EUF-sP-CMA) and can protect the signer’s privacy. We analyzed its computation costs based on experimental data and communication costs. The analysis results indicate that our ABPS scheme has less computation costs than other ABPS schemes and is at the same level as other ABPS schemes on communication costs. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) Communication and Networking)
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18 pages, 1214 KiB  
Article
Privacy-Preserving Attestation Scheme for Revocable UAV Charging Using Hybrid State Channels
by Xuedan Jia, Xiangmei Song and Chuntang Yu
Electronics 2023, 12(19), 3998; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics12193998 - 22 Sep 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 867
Abstract
Although widely applied in varied scenarios, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) suffer severe flight time and flight range limitations due to constrained onboard battery capacity, causing frequent battery recharging when performing persistent missions. The wireless power transfer technology is a promising solution for UAV [...] Read more.
Although widely applied in varied scenarios, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) suffer severe flight time and flight range limitations due to constrained onboard battery capacity, causing frequent battery recharging when performing persistent missions. The wireless power transfer technology is a promising solution for UAV charging by utilizing unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) equipped with wireless charging facilities, where charging time slots are auctioned and assigned to UAVs. However, UGVs themselves also have limited energy capacity, resulting in the need to revoke a UAV charging transaction after auction to satisfy their own demand if necessary. In addition, as UAVs and UGVs are mutually distrustful, inherent security and privacy concerns must be resolved during the revocation. In this paper, we resort to blockchain technology for secure and efficient revocable charging in vehicle-assisted wireless UAV networks. We present PAS, an efficient privacy-preserving attestation scheme for revocable UAV charging based on hybrid state channels, where UAVs and UGVs perform off-chain operations as blockchain users for privacy and efficiency, while security and fairness are guaranteed by the on-chain mechanism. PAS consists of a multi-party state channel and multiple two-party state channels responsible for charging scheduling and transaction revocation, respectively. PAS ensures fair and private revocation negotiation and compensation in a trust-free manner by developing a set of carefully designed modular protocols. We provide PAS’ constituent primitives in detail, prove its security properties following the universally composable (UC) framework, and present experimental results to demonstrate its feasibility and scalability. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) Communication and Networking)
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18 pages, 3463 KiB  
Article
A Collaborative Path Planning Method for Intelligent Agricultural Machinery Based on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
by Min Shi, Xia Feng, Senshan Pan, Xiangmei Song and Linghui Jiang
Electronics 2023, 12(15), 3232; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics12153232 - 26 Jul 2023
Cited by 7 | Viewed by 1801
Abstract
The development of agricultural farming has evolved from traditional agricultural machinery due to its efficiency and autonomy. Intelligent agricultural machinery is capable of autonomous driving and remote control, but due to its limited perception of farmland and field obstacles, the assistance of unmanned [...] Read more.
The development of agricultural farming has evolved from traditional agricultural machinery due to its efficiency and autonomy. Intelligent agricultural machinery is capable of autonomous driving and remote control, but due to its limited perception of farmland and field obstacles, the assistance of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is required. Although existing intelligent systems have greater advantages than traditional agricultural machinery in improving the quality of operations and reducing labor costs, they also produce complex operational planning problems. Especially as agricultural products and fields become more diversified, it is necessary to develop an adaptive operation planning method that takes into account the efficiency and quality of work. However, the existing operation planning methods lack practicality and do not guarantee global optimization because traditional planners only consider the path commands and generate the path in the rectangular field without considering other factors. To overcome these drawbacks, this paper proposes a novel and practical collaborative path planning method for intelligent agricultural machinery based on unmanned aerial vehicles. First, we utilize UAVs for obstacle detection. With the field information and operation data preprocessed, automatic agricultural machinery could be assisted in avoiding obstacles in the field. Second, by considering both the historical state of the current operation and the statistics from previous operations, the real-time control of agricultural machinery is determined. Therefore, the K-means algorithm is used to extract key control parameters and discretize the state space of agricultural machinery. Finally, the dynamic operation plan is established based on the Markov chain. This plan can estimate the probability of agricultural machinery transitioning from one state to another by analyzing data, thereby dynamically determining real-time control strategies. The field test with an automatic tractor shows that the operation planner can achieve higher performance than the other two popular methods. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) Communication and Networking)
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