Networked Simulation for Cybersecurity Evaluation of Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems in Dense Urban Environments

Integrating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into urban areas presents significant opportunities for fast delivery, traffic monitoring, and surveillance to support disaster response. However, existing simulators inadequately address critical elements like Remote Identification broadcasting, multi-operator coordination, and cyberattack modeling, all essential for realistic urban deployment. We introduce a new networked simulation platform for multiple fleets of small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS) in urban settings, with each fleet managed and flown by different operators. We assume ArduPilot controls each UAV. We simulate the broadcast dynamics of the drone Remote Identification, required by drones in the U.S., in dense urban areas using OMNet++. Our simulation platform offers 2D visualization with QGroundControl and 3D visualization with Gazebo. As a distributed simulation, it scales for numerous drones and operators and allows for realistic simulation of cyberattacks. This simulator can address challenges in operating large fleets of UAVs flown by multiple operators in urban environments, such as cybersecurity.