FANET: Communication, mobility models and security issues

In the last decades, technological progress in electronic and avionic systems, mainly device miniaturization and cost reduction, has boosted the performance of the UAV (Unmanned Ariel Vehicles). In addition to the military area, UAVs are nowadays very widespread in the field of civil application. Multiples UAVs system can cooperatively carry out missions more economically and efficiently compared to one UAV systems. Therefore, this choice lead to the development of new networking technologies between UAVs and ground control station. The UAVs network is known as FANET (Flying Ad-Hoc Network), and it is a subset of the MANET (Mobile Ad-Hoc Network). There are many problems to be addressed before effective use of FANET can be made in order to provide reliable and stable context specific networks. In this paper, a view of FANETs is presented from the networking communication challenges perspective. The scope of this survey is to give a comprehensive overview about the existing communications architectures proposed for the FANET networks. We expose the routing protocols, mobility and trajectory optimization models that have been used in FANET to solve communication and collaboration issues between UAVs, we outline the security challenges that need to be overcome and discuss FANET networking open issues. Our goal is to provide a general idea to the researchers about the different topics to be addressed in this area.