Motivation and Challenges 

Today’s commercial usage and correct operation of drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), mainly rely on proprietary and point-to-point communication systems. Preliminary developments and tests have been performed under 5G networks used by rotor UAVs flying at low altitudes/low speeds for border and forest inspection, high voltage/base station inspection, and other use cases. In such use cases, a UAV control vehicle is required to provide reliable network services through 5G networks to the UAV platforms.  

The data of the UAV terminal include control and application data; control data includes navigation commands, configuration changes, flight status data reporting, etc. The UAV control vehicle needs to communicate with the edge components and the 5G+/6G non-RT RIC at the SMO; the extended attack surface can be exploited by malicious applications (rApps) or components at the SMO, adversarial AI attacks, compromised edge services or xApps at near-RT RIC, etc. As described, security is a major challenge in UAV communications, and physical layer security (PLS) is an important technique to improve the reliability and security of data shared through the UAVs.  

Objectives  

The high-level objectives of the pilot are described below:  

• • Improve the protection on 5G+/6G based communication network of the UAV control vehicles and the UAV platforms (systems and devices) throughout its life-cycle by physically implementing secure mechanisms for device onboarding and encrypted end-to-end communication;  
  • Establish audit procedures to control data and application hosting changes at the edge services;  
  • Utilizing shared secret keys between legitimate UAV platforms and edge services users at the PHY layer; and  
  • Enhance the resilience of 5G+/6G communication infrastructure against AI-based jamming attacks.  

Set Up – Infrastructure  

For the needs of the pilot, the non-RT RIC, part of the SMO, will be deployed on the cloud, whereas the near-RT RIC, O-CU, and O-DU are part of the UAV control vehicle. Core O-RAN functionality is needed for allowing the non-RT RIC to obtain UE-level data from the application server, and the near-RT RIC to execute the policies obtained and generate configuration parameters for the E2 nodes. The UAV terminals receive user plane data from the application server.  To be more precise, the infrastructure provided to the project for the needs of the pilot includes hardware and software components of the UAV communication and control, like: multirotor UAV AP-M-2; UAV control vehicle; application server (edge computing service platform) on the control vehicle, where dedicated hardware is hosting the application server and the RAN and 5G+ core infrastructure. A private 5G testbed will be used, supporting 5G R16 in stand-alone mode, with slicing support and end-to-end SDN/NFV compliant architecture and NFV and security orchestrators. Latest O-RAN related capabilities will be provided.