Security Service Pricing Model for UAV Swarms: A Stackelberg Game Approach

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, popularly known as UAVs, have been used in many applications, from healthcare services to military assignments with diverse capabilities such as data transmission, cellular service provisioning, and computational offloading tasks. UAV’s have been recently used to provide Security as a Service (SaaS). SaaS involves technical solutions like anti-virus and anti-spam software, firewalls, using secure operating systems, etc. UAV’s are resource-constrained devices, and thus they are connected to the base station (BS) so that they may avail the computational facilities of the BS. The UAV’s connect themselves to the base station using cluster heads (intermediary devices). At times several UAVs cooperatively come together to serve a given region and such a group of UAVs is called a swarm of UAVs. In real-world scenarios, many stakeholders come together to form UAV swarm configuration proving services to users. Each stakeholder wants to maximize his gains. In this work, we propose a pricing Stackelberg game among UAVs, Cluster heads, and BS by formulating their behavioral utilities. Using particle swarm optimization on each entity’s utility functions, we create an optimal price strategy for each entity to maximize their profit.