Date of Award

Spring 5-4-2016

Access Type

Thesis - Open Access

Degree Name

Master of Science in Cybersecurity Engineering

Department

Electrical, Computer, Software, and Systems Engineering

Committee Chair

Remzi Seker

First Committee Member

Radu Babiceanu

Second Committee Member

Jiawei Yuan

Third Committee Member

Petr Bojda

Abstract

As commercial roles for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) become more well-defined and demand for the services provided by them increases, UAVs rely more on new cloud computing services and co-operative coordination to provide mission planning, control, tracking and data processing. We present UAV as a Service (UAVaaS) framework, which brings features commonly found in traditional cloud services, such as Infrastructure, Platform, and Software as a Service, to the domain of UAVs. Our work aims to conceptualize and design UAVaaS for commercial applications. Specifically, a cloud-provided orchestration framework that allows multi-tenant UAVs to easily serve multiple heterogenous clients at once and automatically re-task them to users with higher priority, mid-flight, if needed. This research utilizes a spiral model design approach to formally define the UAVaaS framework, and to identify key focus areas, protocols, data structures, network topologies, and message patterns. A safety and security analysis is performed to mitigate potential risks that are present in the system and a prototype simulation is implemented as proof of concept.

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