A semi-autonomous distributed blockchain-based framework for UAVs system

Abstract The impact of the Internet of Things (IoT) to our daily life has become bigger than ever, which can be witnessed from smart homes, smart transportation, and smart personal care. With widespread applications of UAVs in IoT contexts such as delivery and military, protecting communications between UAVs and ground control system is needed so as to resist potential vulnerabilities and optimize the coordination between distributed UAVs. In this work, to secure communications during data acquisition and transmission, as well as diminish the probability of attacking by malicious manipulated UAVs, we propose a distributed UAVs scheme harnessing blockchain technology whose network has similar topology to IoT along with cloud server. Instead of directly using the typical blockchain technique which requires expensive computation and high bandwidth overhead, we propose a novel, secure, and lightweight blockchain architecture which mitigates the computation and storage overhead while retaining its privacy and security benefits. Moreover, multiples types of transactions are defined to describe various data access and a novel reputation-based consensus protocol is designed to ensure the reliability of the decentralized network. Finally, performance evaluation demonstrates our blockchain-based distributed scheme is secure and efficient.