Blockchain-Assisted UAV-Employed Casualty Detection Scheme in Search and Rescue Mission in the Internet of Battlefield Things

Abstract

As the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can play a vital role to collect information remotely in a military battlefield, researchers have shown great interest to reveal the domain of internet of battlefield Things (IoBT). In a rescue mission on a battlefield, UAV can collect data from different regions to identify the casualty of a soldier. One of the major challenges in IoBT is to identify the soldier in a complex environment. Image processing algorithm can be helpful if proper methodology can be applied to identify the victims. However, due to the limited hardware resources of a UAV, processing task can be handover to the nearby edge computing server for offloading the task as every second is very crucial in a battlefield. Furthermore, to avoid any third-party interaction in the network and to store the data securely, blockchain can help to create a trusted network as it forms a distributed ledger among the participants. This paper proposes a UAV assisted casualty detection scheme based on image processing algorithm where data is protected using blockchain technology. Result analysis has been conducted to identify the victims on the battlefield successfully using image processing algorithm and network issues like throughput and delay has been analyzed in details using public-key cryptography.