Anti-Jamming and Secure Communication for UAV Swarms in Contested Environments: A Systematic Review

Abstract

The communication link that holds a UAV swarm together is one of the priority targets in modern electronic warfare, because without it the swarm loses the collective behaviour that makes it useful in the first place; when the link fails, coordinated action can break down within seconds. This systematic review looks at three main layers of defence that the research community has developed: waveform-level protection through Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS) and Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS), channel-based protection through Physical Layer Security (PLS), and adaptive AI-based cognitive radio, including multi-agent reinforcement learning, which lets swarms detect and react to jamming with less need for human intervention. These three layers are not really competing with each other - each one deals with a different part of the threat (resisting jamming, resisting interception, and adapting to a changing adversary) - and this review concentrates on the gaps in deployment readiness and technical integration between them, working toward a communication security architecture for military UAV swarms that is closer to being usable in practice. The main finding of the review is a cautious one: every approach discussed here shows measurable gains in simulation, but the field has not yet produced a standardized, layered security architecture that both scales to swarm size and can hold up against an adversary that is itself AI-capable.