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Research Article | Open Access | Download PDF
Volume 13 | Issue 10 | Year 2026 | Article Id. IJECE-V13I10P115 | DOI : https://doi.org/10.14445/23488549/IJECE-V13I10P115

A Comprehensive Survey of Low-Complexity High-Security Techniques for UAV Communications

Jolly Ramesh Nikhade, Shrikant V. Sonekar

Received Revised Accepted Published
05 Jun 2026 02 Oct 2026 14 Oct 2026 28 Oct 2026

Citation :

Jolly Ramesh Nikhade, Shrikant V. Sonekar, "A Comprehensive Survey of Low-Complexity High-Security Techniques for UAV Communications," International Journal of Electronics and Communication Engineering, vol. 13, no. 10, pp. 255-276, 2026. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.14445/23488549/IJECE-V13I10P115

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, are found to play an important role in the progress of 6G wireless communication technology, including military applications, precision agriculture, intelligent transportation, smart surveillance, and disaster management. UAV-based communication is especially vulnerable to a variety of security risks, including eavesdropping, jamming, spoofing, denial-of-service, and hijacking, because of the wireless channel’s intrinsic accessibility and dynamic nature. Strict limitations on energy, compute, latency, and mobility also apply to the UAVs, making the use of traditional sophisticated cryptography methods impractical. Lightweight cryptography, physical layer security, blockchain-based authentication, federated learning, intrusion detection systems, and reinforcement learning-based secure resource allocation are just a few of the low-complexity and high-security solutions for UAV communications that are thoroughly surveyed in this paper. A wide range of UAV designs, including single UAVs, swarm-based UAVs, cellular-connected UAVs, satellite-assisted UAVs, and ad hoc UAV networks, are thoroughly covered in the survey. To offer a cohesive evaluation viewpoint, the performance metrics—such as energy consumption, latency, throughput, dependability, secrecy rate, computational complexity, and packet delivery ratio—are also included. This study provides the reader with organized data on the design of UAV communication systems that are safe, scalable, and energy-efficient for usage in upcoming wireless networks.

Keywords

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Physical Layer Security, Satellite-Assisted UAV, Blockchain-based authentication, and Secrecy rate.

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