Leveraging Blockchain for Secure Drone-to-Everything Communications

Abstract

The popularity of drones has increased their deployment in a wide range of applications like commercial delivery, industrial systems, monitoring, surveillance, and surveys. The facility of fast deployment and cost effectiveness make drones a potential choice for an aerial base station to serve user equipments (UEs) in a defined area. Drones are equipped with night vision cameras, advanced sensors, and GPS receivers, which make them able to capture data and either analyze it to discover new patterns or transmit it to the remote cloud for storage and processing. Furthermore, the drones data relaying system helps to extend the service coverage area to provide reliable communication connection to isolated UEs. However, the deployment of drones at remote locations relies only on GPS, and these systems are prone to various attacks that can lead to signal blockage. Data integrity and privacy are important issues that must be addressed before the deployment of drones in commercial sectors. Therefore, in this article, we propose a blockchain-based security approach for drone-to-everything communications wherein the location of drones is tracked based on the segment division of area under deployment. Moreover, we design a miner node selection algorithm that uses computational resources, battery status, and time of flight of a drone as parameters to select the miner node. The security evaluation of the proposed framework clearly shows the viability of blockchain in drone deployments across remote sites.