The advent of drones has significantly impacted military warfare, providing improved reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition (RSTA), cost savings, increased convenience, safety, and flexibility. A layered network control architecture, known as the internet of drones (IoD), coordinates drone access to controlled airspace and offers navigation services. Various systems, including wireless sensor networks (WSN) and drones directed to an expanded controlling zone, integrate with IoD to improve connection performance. This paper provides an overview of the IoD and the internet of quantum drones (IoQD), highlighting key issues and potential solutions in applications and deployment. The IoQD provides primary features such as secure message exchange, fast communication processes, the viability of creating and deploying private IoQD, and enabling a new field of application, quantum well (QW). In conclusion, the advent of drone technology has significantly improved various aspects of military operations, including reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition. The IoQD offers a promising solution for military networks, facilitating the safe and expedited transfer of data, ultimately benefiting the entire military network.
The advent of drones has significantly impacted military warfare, providing improved reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition (RSTA), cost savings, increased convenience, safety, and flexibility. A layered network control architecture, known as the internet of drones (IoD), coordinates drone access to controlled airspace and offers navigation services. Various systems, including wireless sensor networks (WSN) and drones directed to an expanded controlling zone, integrate with IoD to improve connection performance. This paper provides an overview of the IoD and the internet of quantum drones (IoQD), highlighting key issues and potential solutions in applications and deployment. The IoQD provides primary features such as secure message exchange, fast communication processes, the viability of creating and deploying private IoQD, and enabling a new field of application, quantum well (QW). In conclusion, the advent of drone technology has significantly improved various aspects of military operations, including reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition. The IoQD offers a promising solution for military networks, facilitating the safe and expedited transfer of data, ultimately benefiting the entire military network.
Modern battlefields have been growing in complexity thus putting additional pressure on the need to have quick, precise, and resilient information dominance. Drones have become unavoidable intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and communications tools in the form of autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Nevertheless, the traditional types of drones are limited by sensing accuracy weaknesses, computational latency, exposure to electronic warfare, and unsecured data transmission. New breakthroughs in quantum technologies provide the opportunity to overcome these drawbacks successfully. The article investigates the formation of quantum-enabled sensing, quantum-assisted computing, and quantum-secure communications into future military drone programs. Drone vehicles in battlefields can enjoy a new level of information dominance by using quantum sensors to improve situational awareness, quantum-inspired computing in less time to make critical decisions, and quantum-resistant or quantum key distribution-based communications to exchange data and information securely. The article suggests a stacked design of quantum-powered drone, derives the benefits of its use in contested settings, and explores technical issues connected to scalability, energy requirements, and deployment capabilities. Such an orientation on quantum enables drones as a defense-focused perspective on the future of the battlefield information dominance enabling.
Quantum computing is revolutionizing computation and communication, with its integration into drones transforming agrotech and other industries. The Internet of Quantum Drones (IoQDs) enables ultra-secure communication, rapid data processing, and precise navigation through quantum computing, quantum communication, and quantum sensors. This integration tackles challenges in intelligent farming, such as real-time decision-making, ecological complexity, and efficient data management. IoQDs support applications in precision agriculture, disaster management, environmental monitoring, and defense using quantum-based image processing and machine learning. This chapter explores advancements, case studies, and IoQD integration with 6G and satellites, ensuring low-latency global connectivity. Challenges—scalability, cost, hardware downsizing, and regulations are analyzed alongside potential solutions. A case study on IoQD-based weed detection demonstrates its agricultural potential. Future directions highlight quantum technologies' transformative role in drone networks across industries.
The intersection of quantum technologies with the Internet of Military Defense Things (IoMDT) represents a transformative step in modern warfare and defense strategies. This paper explores the transformative potential of quantum-enabled IoMDT in next-generation 6G network infrastructures, focusing on applications at different levels of military communication and decision-making systems. We explore key areas such as quantum-accelerated data processing for real-time intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, quantum-assisted AI for autonomous decision making, and advanced quantum cryptographic methods to ensure secure and tamper-proof communications. The role of quantum computing in strengthening tactical infrastructure, including secure communications networks, optimising resource allocation and advanced command and control (C2) systems, and addressing significant operational challenges, including environmental sensitivity, integration with existing military systems, scalability, and the need for cost-effective quantum hardware solutions is also explored. Through case studies and detailed analysis, we provide insights into real-world implementations and outline the future directions required to fully realize the potential of quantum technologies in military IoT applications.
Due to recent advancements in quantum drones, the Internet of Quantum Drones (IoQDs), and Drone-to-Satellite connectivity, several advantages have been anticipated for real-time applications. This work examines quantum computing issues, including quantum data processing, techniques, circuits, and algorithms important for quantum drones or their networks. Here, we discussed the current research trends on quantum computing, quantum-safe computing, or post-quantum cryptography important to quantum networks, followed by the numerous advantages, limitations, future advancements, and research issues connected with quantum technologies, drones, and their network. This work has also prepared a taxonomy of quantum-related areas depending upon the logic of their learning, followed by a review of each of these areas. We review the most recent work over quantum algorithms used in various-quantum-related areas and networks, the role of quantum satellites for drone-based networks and communications, how quantum artificial intelligence and quantum machine learning are important for quantum drones, networks and futuristic applications, quantum attacks, quantum genetic algorithms, and the importance of post-quantum and quantum-safe cryptography. The challenges and research directions in these domains are explored as well. Lastly, this work presents an overview of the current state of knowledge in various promising technologies that are recently found to be important for quantum drones and networks.
Quantum technology is an emergent area with the potential to be disruptive and ability to affect many human activities. Quantum technologies are dual-use technologies, and as such, they are the subject of interest for the defence and security industry and military and governmental actors. This report aims to review and map the possible quantum technology military applications to serve as the entry point for international peace and international security assessment, ethics research or military and governmental policy, strategy and decision making. Quantum technologies for military applications, introducing new capabilities, increasing effectiveness and improving precision lead to 'quantum warfare', wherein new military strategies, doctrines, policies and ethics should be established. This report provides a basic overview of quantum technologies under development where the expected time scale of delivery or utilisation impact are estimated. The particular applications of quantum technology for the military are described for various warfare domains (e.g., cyber, space, electronic, underwater warfare, or intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaissance), and related issues and challenges are articulated.
The rapid advance of manufacturing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs, aka drones) has led to a rise in the use of their civilian and commercial applications. The access of these drones to controlled airspace can be efficiently coordinated through particular layered network architecture, often referred to as the Internet-of-Drones (IoD). The nature of IoD, which is deployed in an open-access environment, brings significant safety and security concerns. Classical cryptosystems such as elliptic curve cryptography, Rivest-Shamir-Adleman, and Diffie-Hellman are essential building blocks to secure communication in the IoD. However, with the rapid development of quantum computing, it will be easy to break public-key cryptosystems using efficient quantum algorithms like Shor’s algorithm. Thus, building quantum-safe solutions to enhance IoD security has become imperative. Fortunately, quantum technologies can provide unconditional security solutions to protect data and communications in the IoD environment. This paper proposes a quantum-based scheme to prevent unauthorized drones from accessing a specific flight zone and authenticates the identities and shared secret messages of involved entities. To do so, we used a quantum channel to encode the private information based on a pre-shared key and a random key generated in session. The involved entities also perform mutual authentication and share a secret key. We also provide the security proofs and analysis of the proposed scheme that indicates its resistance to well-known attacks.