Abstract
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, have gained popularity in various fields such as agriculture, emergency response, and search and rescue operations. UAV networks are susceptible to potential security threats, such as wormhole attacks, jamming, spoofing, and false data injection. Time-Delay Attack (TDA) is a unique attack in which malicious UAVs intentionally delay packet forwarding, posing significant threats, especially in time-sensitive applications. It is challenging to distinguish malicious delay from benign network delay due to the dynamic nature of UAV networks, intermittent wireless connectivity, or the Store-Carry-Forward (SCF) mechanism during multi-hop communication. Some existing works propose machine learning-based centralized approaches to detect TDA, which are computationally intensive, have large message overheads, and do not consider the dynamicity of the network due to environmental factors such as wind effects. This paper proposes a novel approach DATAMUt, where the temporal dynamics of the network are represented by a weighted Time-Window Graph (TWiG), and then two deterministic polynomial-time algorithms are presented to detect TDA when UAVs have global and local network Knowledge. Simulation studies show that the proposed algorithms have reduced message overhead by a factor of five and twelve in global and local Knowledge, respectively, compared to existing approaches. Additionally, our approaches achieve approximately 860 and 1050 times less execution time in global and local Knowledge, respectively, outperforming the existing methods.
Recommended Citation
K. Soltani et al., "DATAMUt: Deterministic Algorithms for Time-Delay Attack Detection in Multi-Hop UAV Networks," Icdcn 2026 Proceedings of the International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking 2026, pp. 113 - 122, Association for Computing Machinery, Jan 2026.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.1145/3772290.3772293
Department(s)
Computer Science
Publication Status
Free Access
Keywords and Phrases
Deterministic algorithms; Global Knowledge; Local Knowledge; Shortest path; Time-Delay Attack (TDA); Time-window; Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV); Wind effect
Document Type
Article - Conference proceedings
Document Version
Citation
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2026 Association for Computing Machinery, All rights reserved.
Publication Date
05 Jan 2026
Comments
National Science Foundation, Grant OAC-2104078