Challenges for Swarm of UAV-Based Intelligence

Swarms of UAVs/drones are efficient resources for swarm intelligence, especially for monitoring/detect/react mechanisms. However, the increasing number of nodes in the system inflates the complexity of swarm behaviour, due to computation, communication and control limitations for monitoring and security purposes. In order to maintain the high performance of such a system, mission/safety/operation-critical applications must be verified via the elaboration of critical checkpoints. To make it resilient, this requires real-time updates in different system layers reflected in this paper, and therefore, scalability (from the networking viewpoint) and memory speed limitations (from the processing viewpoint), as well as security controls, are challenging. In the context of swarms of UAVs, this can be accomplished via big data technologies and ledger base chained structures, which is one part of the contribution of this paper. In order to assure resilience against manipulation threats, the other parts of the contribution concern end-to-end trust mechanism (integrated view of the three pillars: networking, processing/optimization as well as security) and swarm controller methods guaranteeing safety, which aims at enabling the trusted scalability of the swarm systems.