Blockchain-Enhanced Spatiotemporal Data Aggregation for UAV-Assisted Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are widely used in the field of monitoring. For data collection of sensor nodes in large-scale monitoring scenarios, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted WSNs have emerged. For the security and validity of data collection, a blockchain-enhanced data collection framework for UAV-assisted WSNs is presented in this article. To reduce data redundancy in WSNs, a sparsity-optimized and compressed sensing-based spatiotemporal data aggregation model is built. A UAV identity authentication mechanism based on a Merkle tree is also designed to ensure the security of data transmission. By combining blockchain building and data aggregation, a disaster semantic blockchain (DSB) based on a data reconstruction-directed consensus mechanism is presented. Disaster semantics are extracted by analyzing the semantic association relationship of disaster, background, event, and sensor data. The experimental results show that the blockchain-enhanced spatiotemporal data aggregation effectively increases the network life cycle and data reconstruction accuracy. The disaster situation can be described accurately through the DSB.