UAV SECaaS: Game-Theoretic Formulation for Security as a Service in UAV Swarms

Unmanned aerial vehicles, popularly known as UAVs, have been used in many applications in the recent past. UAVs have also been recently used to provide security as a service (SECaaS). SECaaS involves technical solutions, like antivirus and antispam software, firewalls, using secure operating systems, etc. UAVs are resource-constrained entities, and thus, they avail the computational facilities of the base station (BS) to serve the users in their range. At times, several UAVs cooperatively come together to serve a given region, and such a group of UAVs is called a swarm of UAVs. Generally, a group/swarm of UAVs connect themselves to the BS through cluster head (CH) UAVs, which are intermediary nodes. In real-world scenarios, many stakeholders come together to form a UAV swarm configuration providing services to users. Each stakeholder wants to maximize gains. This work proposes a pricing Stackelberg game among the UAVs, CHs, and the BS by formulating their behavioral utilities. Using particle swarm optimization on each entity’s utility functions, we create an optimal price strategy to maximize profit.