UAV-Assisted Cluster Head Election for a UAV-Based Wireless Sensor Network

As UAV-related technologies advance greatly, UAV-aided wireless communications such as UAV-aided coverage extension, UAV-aided relaying and UAV-aided data distribution and collection are attracting a lot of attention from government, industry and academic fields. More specifically, the UAV-aided data distribution and collection is substantiated in the form of a UAV-based WSN (Wireless Sensor Network). In the UAV-based WSN, a CH (Cluster Head) plays a very important role such as data collection from its members, transfer of collected data to a UAV and data distribution from a UAV to its members. Such a crucial role of a CH solicits many attackers to try to turn their compromised nodes to CHs. However, because the general CH election framework allows each node to determine a CH role autonomously, any compromised node can declare itself as a CH regardless of its qualification. In this paper, we propose a UAV-assisted CH election framework which collects residual energy of nodes, and employs them for electing new CHs and excluding the lowest energy nodes from CH candidates. Simulation results show that our framework greatly lowers CH election frequency of compromised nodes and number of messages corrupted by them. Another simulation results show that our framework reduces energy consumption of nodes, and extends lifetime of nodes greatly. Our CH election framework can be easily applied to a network of IoT devices because such a network also requires clustering for energy and data management efficiency. We plan to apply as many other CH election schemes as possible into our framework, and to evaluate their security and performance on the framework.