Multidomain blockchain-based intelligent routing in UAV-IoT networks

Abstract

The culmination of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and Internet of Things (IoT) is being utilized considerably in a wide industrial domain due to the development of 5G technologies. In the UAV-IoT domain, Software-defined networking (SDN) presents viable networking architecture as it decouples the application execution from the data repository. For effective deployment, the SDN network must be divided into numerous domains, each of which is handled by a controller. Moreover, the network topology is shared by all controller nodes, allowing for cross-domain path routing to be implemented. Furthermore, since the coordinates of the UAV are known, any change in the location due to UAV mobility can be detected. It will trigger the sharing of the updated routing tables in the UAV network. However, cross-domain routing necessitates a certain confidence level in controllers. Conspicuously, vulnerable controllers may exchange incorrect typologies with other controllers, causing them to inadvertently cross domain boundaries. In the current paper, a blockchain-inspired framework is proposed to provide safe routing across several applicability domains of UAV-IoT. Using the smart contract, all SDN controllers post abstract typologies to the blockchain. As a result, the blockchain provides a viable scenario for the network because of its consensus and immutability. Additionally, it is utilized to ensure routing dependability and managing global reputation in the blockchain. The proposed model achieved enhanced measures of accuracy (96.58%), precision (96.66%), recall (96.69%), and F1-measure (96.61%). The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed technique can successfully develop trust between numerous controllers and enable safe routing across different domains when compared to benchmark systems in terms of temporal efficacy, stability analysis, reliability analysis, and statistical parameters.