Design and Performance Evaluation of Secure RF and WiFi-Based Communication in Drone Swarms via Testbed Implementation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.27028v1
• Date: Thu, 25 Jun 2026 13:36:12 GMT
• Title: Design and Performance Evaluation of Secure RF and WiFi-Based Communication in Drone Swarms via Testbed Implementation
• Abstract summary: We present MAVShield, a lightweight encryption framework for MAVLink communications.<n>It is integrated into four custom-built UAVs to establish secure communication links over RF and WiFi channels.<n>Their performance is evaluated through flight experiments using a UAV swarm testbed.
• Score: 0.5863360388454261
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
• Abstract: Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms rely on distributed coordination and cooperative communication to support scalable operations, extended coverage, and applications such as surveillance and real-time data exchange. Wireless technologies such as radio frequency (RF) and WiFi are widely used for UAV-to-UAV and UAV-to-ground control station (GCS) communication but introduce significant security challenges. MAVLink, the predominant communication protocol in UAV systems, provides message integrity and authentication but lacks built-in encryption, leaving telemetry traffic vulnerable to eavesdropping. In our previous work, we proposed MAVShield, a lightweight encryption framework for MAVLink communications. In this paper, MAVShield, AES-CTR, Speck-CTR, ChaCha20, and Rabbit are integrated into four custom-built UAVs to establish secure communication links over RF and WiFi channels. Their performance is evaluated through flight experiments using a UAV swarm testbed. Encrypted telemetry data enable autonomous formation control and collision avoidance during flight. For collision avoidance, we develop a modified artificial potential field (APF) algorithm that computes attractive and repulsive forces directly in geodetic coordinates, eliminating Cartesian transformations and reducing trajectory oscillations while avoiding local-minimum trapping. CPU utilization, memory consumption, and packet delivery ratio (PDR) are measured for each encryption scheme. Results show that MAVShield achieves performance comparable to unencrypted communication while outperforming AES-CTR, Speck-CTR, ChaCha20, and Rabbit in overall efficiency. Algebraic cryptanalysis and Wireshark-based traffic analysis demonstrate resistance to key-recovery attacks and protection of telemetry confidentiality. The results indicate that MAVShield is an efficient and secure solution for UAV swarm communication.

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