Uncertainty-Aware 3D Position Refinement for Multi-UAV Systems

Reliable real-time 3D localization is essential for multi-UAV navigation, collision avoidance, and coordinated flight, yet onboard estimates can degrade under GNSS multipath, non-line-of-sight reception, vertical drift, and intentional interference. This paper presents a decentralized, lightweight 3D position-refinement layer that improves robustness by fusing each Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)'s local estimate with neighbor-shared state summaries and inter-UAV range or proximity constraints. The method performs uncertainty-aware neighborhood fusion by weighting each UAV's prior according to its reported covariance and weighting neighbor constraints according to link quality, ranging uncertainty, and a learned trust score. To support practical deployment, the framework explicitly handles cold start and temporary localization loss by inflating or substituting weak priors, allowing trusted neighborhood constraints to bootstrap and stabilize estimates until absolute sensing recovers. To mitigate the impact of faulty or malicious participants, each UAV applies a local range-consistency check, smoothed over time, to down-weight or exclude neighbors whose reported positions are incompatible with observed inter-UAV distances. Simulation experiments with 10 UAVs in a 3D volume show that the proposed refinement substantially reduces mean localization error during cold start, remains competitive after local estimators stabilize, and maintains lower error as the fraction of malicious nodes increases compared with fusion without trust. These results suggest that the approach can serve as a practical resilience layer for swarm operation in challenging environments.

Technical Report-IoT Devices Proximity Authentication In Ad Hoc Network Environment

Internet of Things (IoT) is a distributed communication technology system that offers the possibility for physical devices (e.g. vehicles home appliances sensors actuators etc.) known as Things to connect and exchange data more importantly without human interaction. Since IoT plays a significant role in our daily lives we must secure the IoT environment to work effectively. Among the various security requirements authentication to the IoT devices is essential as it is the first step in preventing any negative impact of possible attackers. Using the current IEEE 802.11 infrastructure this paper implements an IoT devices authentication scheme based on something that is in the IoT devices environment (i.e. ambient access points). Data from the broadcast messages (i.e. beacon frame characteristics) are utilized to implement the authentication factor that confirms proximity between two devices in an ad hoc IoT network.