Quantum-Secured Fully Distributed Drone Swarm Coordination Using DC-GHZ Keying and Continuous-Time Quantum Walk Routing

This paper proposes a quantum-secured, fully distributed coordination framework for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms that integrates distributed cluster GHZ (DC-GHZ) quantum key distribution, Hamiltonian continuous-time quantum walk (CTQW) routing, distributed average consensus, and constrained 3D kinematics within a single closed loop. DC-GHZ keying partitions the swarm into entanglement clusters, generates fresh symmetric keys each epoch, and monitors quantum bit error rate (QBER) as an intrinsic spoofing and eavesdrop detection signal. CTQW is applied over a waypoint graph whose potential encodes a multi-objective cost field combining distance, threat intensity, and congestion, while altitude is selected via separation-risk minimization and UAV motion is updated under bounded velocity, acceleration, and climb-rate limits. Our simulation shows that the quantum layer achieves mean QBER values of 0.1152 and 0.1089 across two GHZ clusters and raises intrusion alarms in seven of eight epochs, whereas the routing layer maintains stable average costs in the range 0.2771-0.3740 and the consensus process drives variance to near 10^–3 after initial transients. The results demonstrate that the proposed architecture can simultaneously provide quantum-layer intrusion awareness, stealthy multi-objective routing, collision-aware 3D mobility, and robust decentralized coordination, making it a viable candidate for secure and scalable UAV swarm operations in contested environments.