Scaleable, robust and secure networking of unmanned airborne vehicles (UAVs) is an imperative for achieving Air Force objectives in deploying future effects-based operations (EBO). UAVs of the future must overcome degrading network conditions to transfer critical data for reach-back operations, support peer-peer communications, and operate in high mobility environments. To meet these needs we propose an innovative approach that includes a robust medium access integrated with a novel Multi-Meshed Tree (MMT) routing protocol (developed at RIT) and low-overhead security features. MMT employs a proactive, low-overhead routing and forwarding algorithm that optimizes routes/hops and mitigates TCP connection performance issues. Route redundancy and robustness in MMT is ideally suited to dynamic route changes expected in high mobility UAV networks, while favoring data aggregation and easy handoff between neighboring nodes. MMT's virtualID-based proactive approach overcomes security threats like impersonation, blackhole and route spoofing while providing close monitoring on neighboring node behavior and identifying denial-of-service attack areas. The phase 1 effort will complete the protocol definition, prove performance through an OpNet (commercial package) simulation, and seek industry standards adoption for it. Phase 2 will address feedback from Phase 1 and build prototype hardware for test and demonstration.
Keywords: Wireless Mesh Networks, Manets, Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks, Routing Protocol, Uav Networks, Clustering, Tree Routing, Wireless Network Security
