The Micro Air Vehicle Link (MAVLink in short) is a communication protocol for unmanned systems (e.g., drones, robots). It specifies a comprehensive set of messages exchanged between unmanned systems and ground stations. This protocol is used in major autopilot systems, mainly ArduPilot and PX4, and provides powerful features not only for monitoring and controlling unmanned systems missions, but also for their integration into the Internet. However, there is no technical survey and/or tutorial in the literature that presents these features or explains how to make use of them. Most of the references are online tutorials and basic technical reports, and none of them presents a comprehensive and a systematic coverage of the protocol. In this paper, we address this gap, and we propose an overview of the MAVLink protocol, the difference between its versions, and its potential in enabling Internet connectivity to unmanned systems. We also discuss security aspects of MAVLink. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first technical survey and tutorial on the MAVLink protocol, which represents an important reference for unmanned systems users and developers.

Unmanned aerial systems (UAVs) are dramatically evolving and promoting several civil applications. However, they are still prone to many security issues that threaten public safety. Security becomes even more challenging when they are connected to the Internet as their data stream is exposed to attacks. Unmanned traffic management (UTM) represents one of the most important topics for small unmanned aerial systems for beyond-line-of-sight operations in controlled low-altitude airspace. However, without securing the flight path exchanges between drones and ground stations or control centers, serious security threats may lead to disastrous situations. For example, a predefined flight path could be easily altered to make the drone perform illegal operations. Motivated by these facts, this paper discusses the security issues for UTM’s components and addresses the security requirements for such systems. Moreover, we propose UTM-Chain, a lightweight blockchain-based security solution using hyperledger fabric for UTM of low-altitude UAVs which fits the computational and storage resources limitations of UAVs. Moreover, UTM-Chain provides secure and unalterable traffic data between the UAVs and their ground control stations. The performance of the proposed system related to transaction latency and resource utilization is analyzed by using cAdvisor. Finally, the analysis of security aspects demonstrates that the proposed UTM-Chain scheme is feasible and extensible for the secure sharing of UAV data.

In the last few years, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are making a revolution as an emerging technology with many different applications in the military, civilian, and commercial fields. The advent of autonomous drones has initiated serious challenges, including how to maintain their safe operation during their missions. The safe operation of UAVs remains an open and sensitive issue, since any unexpected behavior of the drone or any hazard would lead to potential risks that might be very severe. The motivation behind this work is to propose a methodology for the safety assurance of drones over the Internet (Internet of drones (IoD)). Two approaches will be used in performing the safety analysis: (1) a qualitative safety analysis approach, and (2) a quantitative safety analysis approach. The first approach uses the international safety standards, namely ISO 12100 and ISO 13849 to assess the safety of drone’s missions by focusing on qualitative assessment techniques. The methodology starts from hazard identification, risk assessment, risk mitigation, and finally draws the safety recommendations associated with a drone delivery use case. The second approach presents a method for the quantitative safety assessment using Bayesian Networks (BN) for probabilistic modeling. BN utilizes the information provided by the first approach to model the safety risks related to UAVs’ flights. An illustrative UAV crash scenario is presented as a case study, followed by a scenario analysis, to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach. These two analyses, qualitative and quantitative, enable all involved stakeholders to detect, explore and address the risks of UAV flights, which will help the industry to better manage the safety concerns of UAVs.

This paper presents new challenges for the development of reconfigurable wireless sensor networks (RWSNs) that adapt dynamically their behaviors to their environment under different properties. An RWSN is a set of networked nodes that execute reconfigurable software tasks for the control of local sensors. We propose a new design methodology named RWiN of an RWSN using unified modeling language (UML) to analyze, construct, develop, and verify easily RWSN architectures. For that, we formulate a metamodel of RWSN based on UML to describe a zone-based architecture that uses a communication protocol for the optimization of distributed reconfigurations. To control the design complexity, we model each agent of this architecture by nested state machines. To verify the temporal constraints by communicating agents, each one is modeled by a timed automaton. The paper's contribution is applied to a case study, which is simulated with TRMSim-WSN and UPPAAL environment to expose the originality of this new architecture.

Failure propagation in smart grids (SGs) complicates and prolongs the recovery time as the faults to be resolved increase. This paper presents the design and implementation of a framework for SGs modeling, simulation, and recovery. The proposed approach is based on a multiagent system composed of static and mobile agents to ensure local and remote resolutions. The efficiency and completeness of the power system recovery protocol are proved as all the existing solutions are analyzed. The use of fault classification and a performing communication process as well as the deployment of local distributed databases updated at run-time ensure the effectiveness of the proposed fault recovery strategy. An experimental study confirms and validates the expected results.

This paper deals with the reconfigurable real-time systems that should be adapted to their environment under real-time constraints. The reconfiguration allows moving from one implementation to another by adding/removing/modifying parameters of real-time software tasks which should meet related deadlines. Implementing those systems as threads generates a complex system code due to the large number of threads, which may lead to a reconfiguration time overhead as well as the energy consumption and the memory allocation increase. Thus this paper proposes a multiobjective optimization approach for reconfigurable systems called MO²R²S for the development of a reconfigurable real-time system. Given a specification, the proposed approach aims to produce an optimal design while ensuring the system feasibility. We focus on three optimization criteria: 1) response time; 2) memory allocation; and 3) energy consumption. To address the portability issue, the optimal design is then transformed to an abstract code that may in turn be transformed to a concrete code which is specific to a procedural programming (i.e., POSIX) or an object-oriented language (i.e., RT-Java). The MO²R²S approach allows reducing the number of threads by minimizing the redundancy between the implementation sets. By an experimental study, such optimization permits to decrease the memory allocation by 28.89%, the energy consumption by 40.2%, and the response time by 61.32%.