Handover Key Management in an LTE-based Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Control Network

Recently, UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) related technologies have significantly developed and its prospective applications include precision agriculture, disaster relief operation, flying crowd surveillance, flying intelligent transportation service, and flying information gathering and dissemination. To operate those promising UAVs in each country's general airspace, we need a reliable and secure link that can well command and control the UAVs. Besides, a mobile telecommunication network such as LTE (Long Term Evolution) can be employed to connect multiple UAVs with their pilots through the network. In this paper, we propose an LTE-based communication architecture to support the control of UAVs. Then, we propose a handover key management scheme for the LTE-based UAV control network. We analyze security of the handover key management scheme and compare it with other schemes. Security analyses show that our scheme keeps a communication key of a serving GRS (Ground Relay Station) safe even though neighboring GRSes are compromised. We plan to do some simulations in order to prove performance and security benefits of our scheme.