Software-Defined Networking for Unmanned Aerial Vehicular Networking and Security: A Survey

Despite the immense benefits offered by the utilization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in civilian and military applications, significant work needs to be done to ensure that these systems are able to securely communicate and resiliently operate to accomplish the mission. As the UAVs grow with their popularity and usability for different applications, there is a dire need to ensure that UAVs and their networks are capable of mitigating cyber-attacks on the fly. One approach that has gained considerable popularity is Software-Defined Networking (SDN) based solutions. SDN is a networking paradigm that has gained attention due to its dynamic flexibility to program networks and increase network visibility, and its potential to assist in the mitigating security vulnerabilities in the network including the network of UAVs. This article provides an overview of recent advances, and current state of art related to security vulnerabilities and SDN enabled countermeasures. This paper also presents a comparison of different approaches in a tabular form and a discussion of challenges and future research directions with respect to UAV security.