Meta-Heuristic Optimal Path Planning in Blockchain-Aided UAV Swarm Network

Abstract

AbstractUnmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are rapidly developing in major fields but also exposed it to security vulnerabilities. UAVs operate in high airborne network where it encounters many obstacles and uncertainty. And the existing path planning algorithms don’t consider path deviation attacks where the data communication is not secured. But, in multiple unmanned aerial vehicles, path planning is a distinctive optimization problem. And for swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) deployed in an uncertain dynamic environment, optimizing the UAV coverage area is a major research area that it needs to be addressed to support effective and secure data transmission. For optimized path planning in UAV swarm, we proposed a modified particle swarm optimization (MPSO) algorithm which encodes the multidimensional points for instant optimal path. The factors that are considered for the encoding helps to find the global optimum. And the blockchain distributed ledger in UAV nodes will protect the UAV network from security attacks such as denial-of-service and man-in-the-middle attacks. It also supports unrestricted coverage area, where the storage is made active only on demand which is dynamically cost-effective in UAV network. Simulation results shows that the proposed algorithm provides instant optimal path with unrestricted coverage aided with data security.KeywordsSwarm optimizationDenial-of-service attackMan-in-the-middle attackBlockchainData securityUnmanned aerial vehicles