A lightweight consensus mechanism for large-scale UAV networking

Publication Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

11-2025

Abstract

Uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms, featured by low cost, rapid deployment, and high mobility, have been regarded as one of key enabling technologies for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). However, as the UAV swarm scales up, the large number of UAVs poses challenges in data consensus, which is essential for decision-making in UAV tasks. In particular, due to the limited resources of UAVs and complex environments, data consensus for swarms requires low energy consumption, high robustness, and high security. To this end, we design a lightweight data consensus mechanism suitable for large-scale UAV swarms. Firstly, considering the high mobility of UAVs, we cluster the UAV swarms based on motion similarity to maintain the stability of clustering. Subsequently, we propose a consensus algorithm named FHotStuff, which achieves low resource consumption by integrating HotStuff and flexible round-optimized Schnorr threshold signatures (Frost). Then, we develop a cross-cluster consensus mechanism. By cooperating with intra-cluster and inter-cluster consensus processes, the mechanism efficiently achieves data consensus in large-scale UAV swarms. Security analyses and performance evaluations show that the proposed scheme can resist common attacks against UAV networks, and validate its lightweight and efficiency.

Keywords

Uncrewed aerial vehicles swarm, cluster networking, data consensus, resource consumption

Discipline

Information Security

Research Areas

Cybersecurity

Publication

IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security

Volume

20

First Page

10361

Last Page

10375

ISSN

1556-6013

Identifier

10.1109/TIFS.2025.3614501

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/TIFS.2025.3614501

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