Secure Distribution of Spectrum Policies to Cognitive Radios in Unmanned Aircraft Systems
Timothy X. Brown, Douglas Sicker · AIAA Infotech@Aerospace 2010 · 2010
*† Unmanned aircraft systems compared to manned aircraft have an inherently greater need for wireless communication and associated spectrum to command and control the aircraft and its payload. Cognitive radios have the potential to increase the amount of available spectrum and improve spectrum management for wireless communication in unmanned aircraft systems. Spectrum access is dynamically managed through spectrum policies. This paper describes a model for secure distribution of these policies to the unmanned aircraft system ground control stations and analyzes its performance. It is shown that existing security mechanisms can be used to provide secure distribution, that the performance requirements are modest, and the system is robust to outages and denial of service attacks. Nomenclature pi = ith policy si = size of policy pi ti = time that policy pi is valid R = data rate N = number of entities accessing a policy I. Overview