UAV-Enabled Social Internet of Vehicles: Roles, Security Issues and Use Cases

Social internet of vehicle (SIoV), also termed vehicular social network (VSN), endeavors to integrate social networking related concepts into IoV, with an aim to make vehicles capable of social communication and low-cost infotainment service provisioning. In spite of potential prospects, some issues pertaining to SIoV remain to be addressed such as security and privacy. Specifically, we in this paper propose an Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) enabled security framework to protect the security and privacy of SIoV. On one hand, we split the evolvement of SIoV into two phases and elaborate the roles and functionalities of vehicles in each stage; on the other hand, owing to high flexibility, fast deployment, and low-cost maintainability, we incorporate UAVs into SIoV with the purpose of accomplishing multiple functions including communication range extension, data processing improvement and security protection. Use cases are also given in hope to provide some insights within UAV enabled SIoV.