A Drone Secure Handover Architecture validated in a Software in the Loop Environment

Abstract

The flight and control capabilities of uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) have increased significantly with recent research for civilian and commercial applications. As a result, these devices are becoming capable of flying ever greater distances, accomplishing flights beyond line of sight (BVLOS). However, given the need for safety guarantees, these flights are increasingly subject to regulations. Handover operations between controllers and the security of the exchanged data are a challenge for implementing these devices in various applications. This paper presents a secure handover architecture between control stations, using a Software in the Loop (SIL) model to validate the adopted strategies and mitigate the time between simulation and real systems implementations. This architecture is developed in two separate modules that perform the security and handover processes. Finally, we validate the proposed architecture with several drone flights on a virtual testbed.