Mitigating Routing Misbehavior in the Internet of Drones Environment

Despite initially made for military purposes, drones have presented themselves to consumers, and the drone industry is expected to witness a significant growth during the forecast period. As the number of drones in the sky keeps growing, a fleet of drones and stationary zone service providers (ZSPs) can form an airborne network which is termed the Internet of Drones (IoD). In order to achieve the objectives of efficient information sharing and superior team performance, routing protocol plays a vital role for reliable communication in the IoD. However, malicious drones may strategically drop any received packets, and traditional mitigation techniques designed specially for mobile/vehicular ad hoc networks are unable to be directly applied in the IoD as a consequence of the intermittent connectivity between drones. In this paper, we propose a distributed countermeasure, also called Counter^Romir, to detect and mitigate routing misbehavior in the IoD. In Counter^Romir, a drone keeps the previous signed communication invoice and shares it with the next-hop drone so that the next-hop drone can detect whether the drone has dropped any packets or not. In consideration of a malicious drone likely misstating its communication invoice to avoid detection, each drone saves and sends a small number of past communication invoices to the ZSP which can detect the misstating drone. We develop a comprehensive simulation framework and conduct extensive simulation experiments using OMNeT++ for performance evaluation and analysis. After comparing with prior schemes, we come to the conclusion that Counter^Romir can provide admirable performance in terms of detection rate, packet delivery ratio, miss/error detection rate, and the number of dropped packets, indicating an applicable approach against routing misbehavior in the IoD.

I. Introduction

The initial use of drones was strike weapons as remotely-guided aerial missile deployers. Today, drones have discovered a variety of applications for civilian use such as goods delivery, aerial surveillance, search and rescue, and combating coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic [1]. According to “Drone Market Report 2020’ ‘, the drone industry is expected to grow to billion by 2025 [2]. As more and more drones invade and occupy our airspace, a fleet of drones and stationary zone service providers (ZSPs) can form an airborne network, which is termed the Internet of Drones (IoD) [3], to carry out a range of challenging tasks. Instead of solely depending on fixed infrastructure, the IoD exploits the intermittent connectivity between drones for the dissemination of information in the highly dynamic environment. In addition, drones may occasionally use ZSPs to connect to the Internet, gathering up-to-date information for their specific tasks [4]. However, not every drone has a direct connection with the ZSP due to the deployment costs of ZSPs. Thus, store-carry-and-forward mechanism and delay tolerant networking technique [5] can be adopted in the IoD, where a drone receives some packets, stores and carries them while flying, and finally forwards them to the next-hop drone or nearby ZSP.