A trusted lightweight communication strategy for flying named data networking

Flying Ad hoc Network (FANET) is a new resource-constrained breed and instantiation of Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) employing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as communicating nodes. These latter follow a predefined path called ’mission’ to provide a wide range of applications/services. Without loss of generality, the services and applications offered by the FANET are based on data/content delivery in various forms such as, but not limited to, pictures, video, status, warnings, and so on. Therefore, a content-centric communication mechanism such as Information Centric Networking (ICN) is essential for FANET. ICN addresses the problems of classical TCP/IP-based Internet. To this end, Content-centric networking (CCN), and Named Data Networking (NDN) are two of the most famous and widely-adapted implementations of ICN due to their intrinsic security mechanism and Interest/Data-based communication. To ensure data security, a signature on the contents is appended to each response/data packet in transit. However, trusted communication is of paramount importance and currently lacks in NDN-driven communication. To fill the gaps, in this paper, we propose a novel trust-aware Monitor-based communication architecture for Flying Named Data Networking (FNDN). We first select the monitors based on their trust and stability, which then become responsible for the interest packets dissemination to avoid broadcast storm problem. Once the interest reaches data producer, the data comes back to the requester through the shortest and most trusted path (which is also the same path through which the interest packet arrived at the producer). Simultaneously, the intermediate UAVs choose whether to check the data authenticity or not, following their subjective belief on its producer’s behavior and thus-forth reducing the computation complexity and delay. Simulation results show that our proposal can sustain the vanilla NDN security levels exceeding the 80% dishonesty detection ratio while reducing the generated end-to-end delay to less than 1 s in the worst case and reducing the average consumed energy by more than two times.