A drone-based data management and optimization using metaheuristic algorithms and blockchain smart contracts in a secure fog environment

Abstract

The advent of fog computing as an extension of cloud-enabling technology has moved from the hub of the internet framework to the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled control and management of drone-based data. The key objectives are to improve the computation and processing of drone-based resource constraints and deliver the data to the outsourced computational node to schedule, process, manage, optimize, and preserve it since they are located close to each other through a wireless sensor network. This collaborative technological approach to robustness is the standard of drone system design and implementation, reducing the computational power, resource consumption, and latency for the application that needs a fast response. However, recent research into fog-enabled drone-based data management and optimization poses a serious challenge in terms of privacy, security, and preservation. On the other hand, Blockchain Hyperledger Technology, which is mostly used in Bitcoin Cryptocurrencies, has been applied in a large number of distributed applications due to the ledger integrity, transparency, trustworthiness, provenance, reliability, availability, protection, and security-related distributed features that are provided. Therefore, the distributed application of drone control has received more attention because of its ability to handle collaborative procedures to capture, schedule, process, optimize, manage, and preserve drone-based data using fog nodes and blockchain hyperledger technology. In this paper, we proposed a collaborative approach using blockchain hyperledger fabric and a metaheuristic-enabled genetic algorithm for fog node management called B-Drone. This approach handles drone-based data collection, scheduling, optimizing, processing, managing, and preservation in a secure manner in the fog node. The protection of each transaction between drone and fog node before exchange is private with the utilization of the hash-encryption (SHA-256) algorithm. The blockchain smart contracts are implemented and deployed to auto-manage all the connectivity and communication protocols between drones and fog nodes in the designed private permissioned network. The simulations of the proposed collaborative approach reduce the computing cost down to 12.03% and increase the performance up to 73.11%, thus decreasing the cost of drone-ledger preservation down to 30.13% and the robust usage of the network up to 54.29% as compared to other state-of-the-art methods .