UAVs-Aided Delay-Tolerant Blockchain Secure Offline Transactions in Post-Disaster Vehicular Networks

Abstract

Vehicular networks which are paralyzed by natural disasters is faced with communication dilemma. Through building a decentralized communication network, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with high mobility and flexibility are expected to be the solution to the post-disaster vehicular networks. The blockchain technology has been widely used in UAV networks to provision the prompt security of distributed communications. However, existing works ignore the dynamics of the network in that due to high mobility, distributed UAVs cannot timely connect to the backbone to synchronize blockchain transactions. The delay of synchronization can result in severe security issues. On addressing the issues, this paper proposes UAVs-aided blockchain offline transactions to ensure the security and effectiveness of delay-tolerant blockchain transactions when UAVs are offline. In specific, we consider vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) charging transactions in post-disaster vehicular networks. By establishing offline channel between charging and discharging electric vehicles (EVs) by hashed time locked contract (HTLC), we design a UAVs aided penalty algorithm with accountable assertions to prevent deposit forging attacks and double-spending attacks. In addition, considering the selfishness of EVs, a Stackelberg game based incentive scheme is developed to encourage EVs to participate the offline transactions and to improve their trust values. By suing the mechanisms above, our proposal addresses the security of offline EV charging, as well as the selfishness of participant. Using extensive simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme can realize secure transactions among EVs and can effectively improve the utilities of EVs through the comparison with conventional schemes.