A Systematic Survey: Security Threats to UAV-Aided IoT Applications, Taxonomy, Current Challenges and Requirements with Future Research Directions

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as an intermediary can offer an efficient and useful communication paradigm for different Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Following the operational capabilities of IoTs, this emerging technology could be extremely helpful in the area, where human access is not possible. Because IoT devices are employed in an infrastructure-less environment, where they communicate with each other via the wireless medium to share accumulated data in network topological order. However, the unstructured deployment with wireless and dynamic communication make them disclosed to various security threats, which need to be addressed for their efficient results. Therefore, the primary objective of this work is to present a comprehensive survey of the theoretical literature associated with security concerns of this emerging technology from 2015-to-2022. To follow up this, we have overviewed different security threats of UAV-aided IoT applications followed by their countermeasures techniques to identify the current challenges and requirements of this emerging technology paradigm that must be addressed by researchers, enterprise market, and industry stakeholders. In light of underscored constrains, we have highlighted the open security challenges that could be assumed a move forward step toward setting the future research insights. By doing this, we set a preface for the answer to a question, why this paper is needed in the presence of published review articles. For novelty and uniqueness, we have performed a comparative analysis section-wise with rival papers to demonstrate that how this paper is different from them.