Abstract
The UAV is emerging as one of the greatest technology developments for rapid network coverage provisioning at affordable cost. The aim of this paper is to outsource network coverage of a specific area according to a desired quality of service requirement and to enable various entities in the network to have intelligence to make autonomous decisions using blockchain and auction mechanisms. In this regard, by considering a multiple-UAV network where each UAV is associated to its own controlling operator, this paper addresses two major challenges: the selection of the UAV for the desired quality of network coverage and the development of a distributed and autonomous real-time monitoring framework for the enforcement of service level agreement (SLA). For a suitable UAV selection, we employ a reputation-based auction mechanism to model the interaction between the business agent who is interested in outsourcing the network coverage and the UAV operators serving in closeby areas. In addition, theoretical analysis is performed to show that the proposed auction mechanism attains a dominant strategy equilibrium. For the SLA enforcement and trust model, we propose a permissioned blockchain architecture considering Support Vector Machine (SVM) for real-time autonomous and distributed monitoring of UAV service. In particular, smart contract features of the blockchain are invoked for enforcing the SLA terms of payment and penalty, and for quantifying the UAV service reputation. Simulation results confirm the accuracy of theoretical analysis and efficacy of the proposed model.
Highlights
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have the potential to boost capacity and coverage of existing cellular networks [1]
UAVs can be deployed as aerial base stations to support wireless communications and internet of things (IoT) in various scenarios such as remote areas [2], emergency situations [3], sports events, and festivals where the installation of terrestrial base stations is too expensive if not impossible [4]
By exploiting the intrinsic amalgam of auction based game theory, machine learning and blockchain, we have proposed a novel framework for autonomous selection and operation of UAV for network coverage
Summary
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have the potential to boost capacity and coverage of existing cellular networks [1]. Absence of a proper mechanism for example organizing a competitive selection process, could lead the UAV operators to be untruthful for seeking profits at the expense of internal standards of service, which may cause a customer to pay high service cost In this regard, economic models and pricing using game theory and auctioning have been extensively analyzed to address resource allocation and various security issues in wireless network [12], [13]. Blockchain has been proposed in [49] for achieving privacy preserving secure spectrum trading in UAV assisted cellular networks It has been proposed for conducting secure and distributed auctioning to address the economic challenges of resource allocation in both heterogeneous and co-operative wireless networks [50], [21].
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