A new predictive based secure geographic routing strategy for UAV network under location spoofing attack

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm network consisting of a collection of micro UAVs can be used for many applications. It is well established that packet routing is a fundamental problem to achieve UAV collaboration. However, the highly dynamic nature of UAVs, frequently changing network topologies and security issues, poses significant challenges to packet forwarding in UAV networks. The existing topology-based routing protocols are not well suited in UAV network due to their high controlling overhead or excessive end-to-end delay. Geographic routing is regarded as a promising solution, as it only requires local information. In order to enhance the accuracy and security of geographic routing in highly dynamic UAV network, in this paper, we propose a new predictive geographic (PGeo) routing strategy with location verification. First, a detection mechanism is adopted to recognize malicious UAVs falsifying their location. Then, an accurate average service time of a packet in the medium access control (MAC) layer is derived to assist location prediction. The proposed delay model can provide a theoretical basis for future work, and our simulation results reveal that PGeo outstrips the existing geographic routing protocols in terms of packet delivery ratio in the presence of location spoofing behavior.