Flying through the secure fog: A complete study on UAV‐Fog in heterogeneous networks

Abstract

Summary A drone or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is becoming a trending area for researchers worldwide. UAV's contribution is increasing in day‐to‐day life, whether it is in a military zone, disaster management, healthcare sector, smart cities, Internet of Things (IoT), urban air mobility, and many more. In contrast, UAV's limited computational capability and low‐energy sources pose significant challenges for real‐time data processing, storage, networking, and security that are critical in emergencies such as floods, earthquakes, and cyclones. UAVs are rapidly used to satisfy user requirements as well as services. As the demand for UAVs aided heterogeneous wireless networks increases in critical emergencies, fog computing serves several benefits to fulfill users' demands in terms of low latency, support, data storage, mobility, availability, scalability, and so on. This study aims to present a comprehensive study with their technical aspects for understanding fog computing, security issues, privacy concerns, and risks, along with its solutions. This paper suggests the collaboration of UAV‐Fog architecture based on the four‐tier network consisting of smart things, local UAVs, UAV‐Fog, and cloud server, to control UAV's data and also described some of the security issues faced by this cloud infrastructure. Further, this research article also sheds new light on some scenarios of UAV‐Fog for such deployments, applications, opportunities, challenges, and their major security threats and their countermeasures. Afterward, we design taxonomy of the collaboration of UAV‐Fog with their respective approaches.

Security analysis of fog computing environment for ensuring the security and privacy of information

“…The virtualization of resources generates numerous problems. These difficulties include delay, start‐up, positioning, movement of virtual network devices within a fog network, and other related issues 3,19,33,48,52 …”

“…The virtualization of resources generates numerous problems. These difficulties include delay, start-up, positioning, movement of virtual network devices within a fog network, and other related issues 3,19,33,48,52 Real-world issues: While considering the real time application domains that utilizes the fog computing are the time sensitive fields like the traffic light systems and the health-care system. The response delay due to the DDoS attacks in the network makes the application processing a challenging task 25,38,57…”

“…Software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) are the services provided by cloud computing. Over the past several years, a huge increase in cloud users has resulted in a significant demand for IoT 3 . With billions of IoT devices connected through the cloud, centralized processing frequently makes the network struggle 4 .…”

“…Over the past several years, a huge increase in cloud users has resulted in a significant demand for IoT. 3 With billions of IoT devices connected through the cloud, centralized processing frequently makes the network struggle. 4 Issues like poor service quality, excessive latency, and network congestion make the inability to process real-time services, leading to the development of fog computing.…”

Unmanned aerial vehicles in collaboration with fog computing network for improving quality of service

“…UAV-fog network helps to control and estimate the risk of disaster and handles post-disaster recoveries. 12 Moreover, the collaboration of UAVs and fog computing is a challenge because of the intricacy of the working environment, the unpredictability of terminal user distribution, and the restrictions of the UAV's energy. Thus, it is required to plan an optimal path for UAVs when employing collaboratively with fog computing to address these challenges.…”