This paper presents a comprehensive survey on anti-drone systems. After drones were released for non-military usages, drone incidents in the unarmed population are gradually increasing. However, it is unaffordable to construct a military grade anti-drone system for every private or public facility due to installation and operation costs, and regulatory restrictions. We focus on analyzing anti-drone system that does not use military weapons, investigating a wide range of anti-drone technologies, and deriving proper system models for reliable drone defense. We categorized anti-drone technologies into detection, identification, and neutralization, and reviewed numerous studies on each. Then, we propose a hypothetical anti-drone system that presents the guidelines for adaptable and effective drone defense operations. Further, we discuss drone-side safety and security schemes that could nullify current anti-drone methods, and propose future solutions to resolve these challenges.

The recent development of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology has shown the possibility of using UAVs in many research and industrial fields. One of them is for UAVs moving in swarms to provide wireless networks in environments where there is no network infrastructure. Although this method has the advantage of being able to provide a network quickly and at a low cost, it may cause scalability problems in multi-hop connectivity and UAV control when trying to cover a large area. Therefore, as more UAVs are used to form drone networks, the problem of efficiently controlling the network topology must be solved. To solve this problem, we propose a topology control system for drone networks, which analyzes relative positions among UAVs within a swarm, then optimizes connectivity among them in perspective of both interference and energy consumption, and finally reshapes a logical structure of drone networks by choosing neighbors per UAV and mapping data flows over them. The most important function in the scheme is the connectivity optimization because it should be adaptively conducted according to the dynamically changing complex network conditions, which includes network characteristics such as user density and UAV characteristics such as power consumption. Since neither a simple mathematical framework nor a network simulation tool for optimization can be a solution, we need to resort to reinforcement learning, specifically DDPG, with which each UAV can adjust its connectivity to other drones. In addition, the proposed system minimizes the learning time by flexibly changing the number of steps used for parameter learning according to the deployment of new UAVs. The performance of the proposed system was verified through simulation experiments and theoretical analysis on various topologies consisting of multiple UAVs.

Research on drones becomes vigorous not only for single drone but also drone fleet, which operates multiple drones in a formation. To widen the applicability of drone fleet, high positioning accuracy and low latency are required. Most drone products or research use the Global Positioning System (GPS) for positioning, but the accuracy is insufficient for performing various drone missions in dense or indoor environments. In this paper, we present a novel Ultra-wideband (UWB) positioning system that uses an out-of-band network for control channel. Each UWB module serves as a remote sensor for detecting and positioning multiple drones. Unlike traditional anchor-tag based UWB ranging, all nodes in the proposed system have no distinction between the roles of anchor and tag by utilizing enhanced multidimensional scaling (MDS). We practically implemented our proposed system and evaluated the system with numerical experiments. Through the numerical analysis, we have found that the proposed system provides enough accuracy and low latency to be applied to the drone fleet.

Since unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), such as drones, are used in various fields due to their high utilization and agile mobility, technologies to deal with multiple UAVs are becoming more important. There are many advantages to using multiple drones in a swarm, but, at the same time, each drone requires a strong connection to some or all of the other drones. This paper presents a superior approach for the UAV network’s routing system without wasting memory and computing power. We design a routing system called the geolocation ad hoc network (GLAN) using geolocation information, and we build an adaptive GLAN (AGLAN) system that applies reinforcement learning to adapt to the changing environment. Furthermore, we increase the learning speed by applying a pseudo-attention function to the existing reinforcement learning. We evaluate the proposed system against traditional routing algorithms.

Even though wireless networks are inevitable in mobile or infrastructure-less communication systems, such as vehicle-to-everything (V2X) infrastructure in automobile, precise formation control of unmanned vehicles (UVs), or other industries that employ ad hoc deployment of systems, operation and maintenance of network applications additionally impose time constraints on the wireless network. Such the requirement poses an immediate challenge to the time-sensitive aspects of devices, applications and network control, which has been addressed in the realm of time-sensitive networking (TSN). Meanwhile, software-defined networking (SDN) has successfully presented its efficiencies in ensuring quality of service for network traffic to accommodate many functions of network control and management. In this regard, we propose a traffic engineering solution based on reinforcement learning (RL) to implement TSN links with SDN over the wireless network, then optimize the quality of TSN links, and protect background traffic from TSN-enabled but SDN-supported traffic. We implemented SDN-based TSN on a real testbed, consisting of real nodes as single board computers (SBCs) and an SDN controller, and applied RL-based network control solution to the network. The empirical results are promising in that the jitter of time-constrained traffic is improved by 24.6 % and throughput of background traffic is increased by 6.5 %, compared to the manual configuration mode.

Drones have become essential tools across various industries due to their ability to provide real-time data and perform automated tasks. However, integrating multiple sensors on a single drone poses challenges such as payload limitations and data management issues. This paper proposes a comprehensive system that leverages advanced deep learning techniques, specifically an attention-based generative adversarial network (GAN), to address data scarcity in drone-collected time-series sensor data. By adjusting sensing frequency based on operational conditions while maintaining data resolution, our system ensures consistent and high-quality data collection. The spatiotemporal The attention mechanism within the GAN enhances the generation of synthetic data, filling gaps caused by reduced sensing frequency with realistic data. This approach improves the efficiency and performance of various applications, such as precision agriculture, environmental monitoring, and surveillance. The experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of our methodology in extending the operational range and duration of drones and providing reliable augmented data utilizing a variety of evaluation metrics. Furthermore, the superior performance of the proposed system was verified by comparing it with various comparative GAN models.