Temporal Consensus-Aware Hash-Chained Trust Management for Secure Routing in FANETs

Flying Ad-hoc Networks (FANETs) find their way into mission critical environments ranging from disaster relief, military reconnaissance to agriculture and urban surveillance systems. Dynamic topologies in FANETs expose traditional routing protocols to possible insider attacks that subtly compromise network operation. We present BDTM (Blockchain-inspired Decentralized Trust Management) which is a resource-efficient decentralized system that exploits immutability via hash chains and distributed trust validation without relying on consensus of the entire blockchain. BDTM enhances AODV routing protocol using four key components: time-weighted trust updates, normalized composite trust score calculations, neighborhood consensus based trust calculation with a confidence measure and collusive attacks resistance mechanisms. Simulation studies are performed using NS-3 simulator with 20-100 UAV nodes, mobility speeds of 5-30 m/s and attack ratios varying from 0% to 30%, Blackhole, Sybil and Grayhole attack scenarios. Simulation results demonstrate that BDTM outperforms the performances of Standard AODV, SAODV, WATCHDOG-AODV and TMRP in terms of PDR and throughput. PDR improvements by BDTM vary between 8% and 43%, depending on the number of nodes and attack ratio. Meanwhile, throughput maintenance in presence of attacks from 0% to 30% achieves values of 79% and 89%. Energy consumption analysis shows that overhead introduced by the gossip protocol is around 0.93 mJ per gossip round.