Comparison Study between PoW and PoS Blockchains for Unmanned Aircraft System Traffic Management

Abstract

This paper presents a novel consensus algorithm for Unmanned Aircraft System Traffic Management (UTM). Blockchain as a highly secured consensus protocol was used for airspace allocation. A smart contract in charge of airspace allocation was designed based on the Ethereum blockchain. Hence, the action of sharding could be done to reduce the computational complexity in the swarm flight zone. According to the sharded flight zone, a decentralized voting platform was developed using two main approaches, namely Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS). A swarm flight zone was arranged using a number of 1000 UAS-S4 at different locations and heading angles. The performance of the designed decentralized consensus system was evaluated in terms of error rate and validation time. Although the PoS approach was faster than the PoW, the comparison study showed that the PoW approach was better than the PoS in terms of error rate.