Amateur Drone Monitoring: State-of-the-Art Architectures, Key Enabling Technologies, and Future Research Directions

Abstract

The unmanned air-vehicle (UAV) or mini-drones equipped with sensors are becoming increasingly popular for various commercial, industrial, and public-safety applications. However, drones with uncontrolled deployment poses challenges for highly security-sensitive areas such as President house, nuclear plants, and commercial areas because they can be used unlawfully. In this article, to cope with security-sensitive challenges, we propose point-to-point and flying ad-hoc network (FANET) architectures to assist the efficient deployment of monitoring drones (MDr). To capture amateur drone (ADr), MDr must have the capability to efficiently and timely detect, track, jam, and hunt the ADr. We discuss the capabilities of the existing detection, tracking, localization, and routing schemes and also present the limitations in these schemes as further research challenges. Moreover, the future challenges related to co-channel interference, channel model design, and cooperative schemes are discussed. Our findings indicate that MDr deployment is necessary for caring of ADr, and intensive research and development is required to fill the gaps in the existing technologies.