A Network Coding Approach for Reliable SDN Based UAV Networks

Recently, the integration of unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) in Software–Defined Networking (SDN) based environments has seen an increasing research turnout as it allows a logical centralization of the control function while enhancing Information Technology (IT) management. This paper focuses on the use of Network Coding (NC) to secure the exchanged data between the UAVs where we consider the deployment of an SDN-based UAV architecture in a logical environment. We also consider the integration of NC in a UAV-SDN-based architecture to reduce the number of packet retransmissions and improve network reliability in lossy networks. To further secure data integrity in our system, we propose a pollution attack detection method as a tool to identify and block malicious packets from accessing the network. We assume that the UAVs are powerful enough to perform all encoding and decoding operations during communication.