Distributed Flow Permission Inspection for Mission-Critical Communication of Untrusted Autonomous Vehicles

Swarms of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) are used for cooperative sensing, clarification and communication relaying in disaster situations and, thereby, allow to reduce jeopardizing the health of rescue personnel. Having meshed interconnection, a swarm maintains a communication network dedicated for applications with context-dependent performance requirements that require reliable traffic classification and conditioning. Nevertheless, these systems are vulnerable because UAVs/UGVs may act incorrectly resulting in an erroneous network behavior which may affect the performance of mission-critical flows. This is a major problem if a couple of untrusted UAVs and UGVs from different rescue organizations are connected. In this paper, the reliability of traffic conditioning within untrusted swarms is enhanced by the Distributed Flow Permission Inspection (DiFPIN) scheme. DiFPIN is used to verify the flow classification to circumvent the usage of erroneous entities on the transmission path. Thereby, the negative impairment of mission-critical flows can be reduced.