A Cooperative Network Management Architecture for Manned–Unmanned Aircraft Teaming Using Network Drones

Conventional direct communication in Manned–Unmanned Teaming (MUM-T) suffers from fundamental scalability and security limitations. As the number of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) increases, the communication burden on the manned aircraft (MA) grows significantly, while security threats originating from UAVs may directly propagate to the MA. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a hierarchical communication architecture that introduces dedicated Network Drones (NDs) as intermediate communication mediators and trust boundaries between the MA and multiple UAV swarms. In the proposed design, the MA interacts exclusively with NDs, while UAV swarms communicate through ND-mediated links, effectively bounding the number of MA-facing connections and enabling scalable communication. Building on this structured communication model, a message-level Zero-Trust framework is enforced at the MA–ND interface. Each message is evaluated using a multi-dimensional risk model that incorporates authentication consistency, behavioral consistency, content validity, and contextual information, enabling early detection and containment of compromised UAV behavior. Furthermore, the architecture incorporates backup planning mechanisms, including dynamic reassociation and hot-standby operation, to ensure robust communication under ND failure conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach reduces MA-facing communication overhead, stabilizes end-to-end latency, and improves detection performance in terms of false positives and false negatives, while maintaining system robustness under failure scenarios.