Blockchain Papers

Ch. Rupa, Gautam Srivastava, Thippa Reddy Gadekallu, Praveen Kumar Reddy Maddikunta · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Mohtasin Golam, Jae‐Min Lee, Dong‐Seong Kim

The significant advancement of blockchain technology in the field of industrial networks has created a meaningful impact and for this, it comes to the field of the military where blockchain can have a greater impact. In the military environment, a lot of machines and smart devices are connected. Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) combined with mobile edge computing (MEC) can offer real-time services. However, through the UAV, smart devices and intelligent machines, attackers can easily access. This leads to disruption on operations and revealing the data confidentiality to an adversary. To prevent this issue an architecture is proposed based on blockchain technology. The architecture is applied to provide a solution for malicious cyber-attacks and prevent data loss to ensure the security on device-to-device (D2D) communication in the military network to provide maximum security. Simulation results illustrate that how efficaciously the applied method can work for restorative the security on D2D communication. Finally, in conclusion, how the proposed framework can be enhanced by applying other feasible techniques along with future research directions is discussed.

Md Masuduzzaman, Anik Islam, Tariq Rahim, Soo Young Shin

As the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can play a vital role to collect information remotely in a military battlefield, researchers have shown great interest to reveal the domain of internet of battlefield Things (IoBT). In a rescue mission on a battlefield, UAV can collect data from different regions to identify the casualty of a soldier. One of the major challenges in IoBT is to identify the soldier in a complex environment. Image processing algorithm can be helpful if proper methodology can be applied to identify the victims. However, due to the limited hardware resources of a UAV, processing task can be handover to the nearby edge computing server for offloading the task as every second is very crucial in a battlefield. Furthermore, to avoid any third-party interaction in the network and to store the data securely, blockchain can help to create a trusted network as it forms a distributed ledger among the participants. This paper proposes a UAV assisted casualty detection scheme based on image processing algorithm where data is protected using blockchain technology. Result analysis has been conducted to identify the victims on the battlefield successfully using image processing algorithm and network issues like throughput and delay has been analyzed in details using public-key cryptography.

Xiaobin Xu, Hui Zhao, Haipeng Yao, Shangguang Wang

With the rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT), more and more applications focus on the detection of unmanned areas. With the assistance of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), IoT devices are able to access the network via aerial base stations. These UAV-assisted IoT applications still face security and energy challenges. The open environment of IoT applications makes the application easy to encounter external invasion. Limited energy of UAV results in the limited lifetime of network access. To address these challenges, researches on IoT security and energy efficiency are becoming hotspots. Nevertheless, in the UAV continuous coverage scenario, there is still an enormous potential to improve the security and efficiency of data collection in IoT applications. In this article, blockchain is introduced into the scene of UAV-assisted IoT, and a data collection system considering security and energy efficiency is proposed. In this system, UAV, as an edge data collection node, provides a long-term network access for IoT devices through regular cruises with recharging. By forwarding data and recording transactions, UAVs get charging coins as rewards. UAVs use charging coins to exchange charging time. UAV swarm builds distributed ledgers based on blockchain to resist the invasion of malicious UAV. In order to reduce energy consumption, this article designs an adaptive linear prediction algorithm. Through this algorithm, IoT devices upload prediction model instead of original data to greatly reduce in-network transmissions. Simulation results show that the proposed system can effectively improve the security and efficiency of data collection.

Samir Dawaliby, Arezki Aberkane, Abbas Bradai

The growing number of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), typically referred to as drones, poses new challenges on how to manage their operations in various internet of things (IoT) use cases such as surveillance and monitoring, weather prediction, agriculture, etc. The latter includes a massive number of devices that sometimes produce invalid messages due to lack of energy or system shutdown and needs to be autonomously monitored with drones in rural areas. In this paper, we develop a blockchain-based platform for managing drone IoT operations while maintaining trust and security. The test-bed consists of IoT devices, a drone and blockchain-enabled gateways through which drones are controlled to replace malfunctioning devices. The latter are detected using Z-score observation algorithm which launches a smart contract and sends the drone with clear operation order. The results obtained in realistic agriculture use case highlight the utility of our proposition in decreasing signaling and operation time, improving the percentage of successful maintenance operations and providing trust and security when managing drones in an autonomous manner.

Maninderpal Singh, Gagangeet Singh Aujla, Rasmeet Singh Bali, Sahil Vashisht · 6 authors

COVID-19 made the world stop, with people trapped inside their homes and governments trying to restrict the public movement. However, to accomplish this, one big problem that emerged and outscored everything else was catering to the day to day necessary items of the people without human involvement. In this regard, we propose a blockchain-enabled secure communication framework for delivering the goods in COVID-19 like scenarios by leveraging the drones that are available with commercial retail providers. The blockchain scheme is used to create smart contracts to build the trust of buyers and sellers on the framework as the payments are made through the smart contract executions. The blockchain based order processing ensures the integrity and authenticity of the information. Moreover, a communication model is presented along with the order, delivery and payment phases. The results prove the effectiveness of the proposed scheme by evaluating it based on gas price, transaction time, and mining time.

Mohammad Wazid, Basudeb Bera, Ankush Mitra, Ashok Kumar Das · 5 authors

Internet of Drones (IoD) architecture is designed to support a co-ordinated access for the airspace using the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) known as drones. Recently, IoD communication environment is extremely useful for various applications in our daily activities. Artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled Internet of Things (IoT)-based drone-aided healthcare service is a specialized environment which can be used for different types of tasks, for instance, blood and urine samples collections, medicine delivery and for the delivery of other medical needs including the current pandemic of COVID-19. Due to wireless nature of communication among the deployed drones and their ground station server, several attacks (for example, replay, man-in-the-middle, impersonation and privileged-insider attacks) can be easily mounted by malicious attackers. To protect such attacks, the deployment of effective authentication, access control and key management schemes are extremely important in the IoD environment. Furthermore, combining the blockchain mechanism with deployed authentication make it more robust against various types of attacks. To mitigate such issues, we propose a private-blockchain based framework for secure communication in an IoT-enabled drone-aided healthcare environment. The blockchain-based simulation of the proposed framework has been carried out to measure its impact on various performance parameters.

Shiva Raj Pokhrel

We consider a new blockchain empowered federated learning approach which uses wireless mobile miners at drones in the future sixth generation (6G) networks for a disaster response system. Our focus is on the blockchain latency, and energy consumption in the proposed architecture of the network of drones. Maintaining low delay in wireless communication between the drones is required to minimize blockchain forking events while performing blockchain operations. Therefore, we quantify the probability of occurrence of forking events to analyze the uncertainty of the system towards the additional energy wastage. The forked block (due to channel impairments or mobility) incurs re-computation energy. We develop pragmatic analyses of the expected energy consumption by considering the parameters like the number of miners as well as the power consumed during computing, block transfer and 6G channel dynamics for the system.

Marek Košuda, Pavol Lipovský, Wenjiang Yang, Mingliang Bai · 6 authors

A rise in usage of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) in commercial and civilian applications as a result of the recent advancement in manufacturing processes, communications, and networking technology led to the demand for access to non-segregated airspace. The steady development of UAS has created a dynamic environment moving at faster pace than manned aviation. In particular, there is an intense pressure on operations in very low altitudes where market is driven by new business models. Commercial UAS operators are expected to monitor weather, changes in airspace structure, avoid buildings and temporary obstacles, consider potential risks arising from the ground, and maintain separation from manned aviation. On the other hand, authorities are expected to monitor, and control unmanned aerial traffic as well as enforce the airspace rules. To address this arising requirements unmanned traffic management is being developed and deployed in numerous countries, which aims to enable safe and efficient operations of highly automated UAS in automated unmanned traffic management (UTM) system developed on foundations of modern technologies such as artificial intelligence, the Internet-of-Things, 5G networks while considering the need to address cybersecurity requirements. Among cybersecurity requirements a potential candidate with promising applications is blockchain technology, which is a distributed ledger of immutable records stored in a decentralized database. This paper discusses potential applications of blockchain technology that could support UAS operations and increase security in storing crucial flight data.

Yulei Wu, Hong‐Ning Dai, Hao Wang, Kim‐Kwang Raymond Choo

5G-enabled drones have potential applications in a variety of both military and civilian settings (e.g., monitoring and tracking of individuals in demonstrations and/or enforcing of social / physical distancing during pandemics such as COVID-19). Such applications generally involve the collection and dissemination of (massive) data from the drones to remote data centres for storage and analysis, for example via 5G networks. Consequently, there are security and privacy considerations underpinning 5G-enabled drone communications. We posit the potential of leveraging blockchain to facilitate privacy preservation, and therefore in this article we will review existing blockchain-based solutions after introducing the architecture for 5G-enabled drone communications and blockchain. We will also review existing legislation and data privacy regulations that need to be considered in the design of blockchain-based solutions, as well as identifying potential challenges and open issues which will hopefully inform future research agenda.

Meng Li, F. Richard Yu, Pengbo Si, Ruizhe Yang · 6 authors

Recently, the development of the internet of Things (ioT) provides plenty of opportunities and challenges in various fields. As an essential part of ioT, machine-to-machine (M2M) communications open a novel way that machine-type communication devices (MTCDs) are connected and communicated without any human intervention. However, when ioT infrastructures are destroyed, network services will be disrupted. Then it is difficult for the MTCDs located in remote areas to restore communication by themselves immediately. To cope with these problems, in this article, we introduce some promising technologies such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), blockchain and mobile edge computing (MEC) to ensure data transmission, security and reliability in damaged M2M communications networks. Meanwhile, we propose a joint optimization framework to maximize both data computation capacity and throughput of blockchain systems, and formulate it as a Markov decision process (MDP). in order to solve the dynamic and complicated optimization problem, dueling deep Q-network (DQN) is adopted, so that the optimal selection and decision can be made to achieve maximum system rewards. Simulation results with different system parameters show that our proposed framework can improve the system performance effectively compared to the existing schemes. Finally, open research issues and challenges are discussed for UAV-assisted M2M communications.

Rajesh Gupta, Aparna Kumari, Sudeep Tanwar, Neeraj Kumar

With the spread of novel coronavirus, global health concerns have increased as it has flattened the curve of mortality worldwide. To handle such a containment of disease, multi-swarm Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with 5G can be used to reduce human intervention with major benefits of high bandwidth, ultra-low-latency, and reliability. Multi-swarm UAVs sends a huge amount of data to ground stations with real-time connection density of 107/km2, which is a bottleneck on 5G networks; data security is another issue in sharing sensitive data. Motivated by these issues, in this article, we propose a blockchain-envisioned softwarized multi-swarming UAV communication scheme based on a 6G network with intelligent connectivity, Terahertz (THz) frequency bands, and virtualization of link and physical-level protocols. Softwarization makes the communication infrastructure flexible, agile, and easily configurable, and the potential of blockchain supports data security. Results show that the proposed scheme performs better in terms of processing delay, packet loss reduction, and throughput compared to exiting 4G/5G-based systems.

Shubhani Aggarwal, Neeraj Kumar, Sudeep Tanwar

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) can provide efficient and effective solutions for the development of smart cities. They have been widely used in civilian and military applications, such as data acquisition, data dissemination, audio and video surveillance, aerial photography, crop surveys, and real-time medical care. The network communication and security challenges in UAV networks are explored by research organizations across the globe, but still, many challenges remain unsolved like sensitive and end-user-related applications. Moreover, traditional UAV communication is not adequate to deal with the high mobility and dynamic features of UAV. So, there is a need for an efficient and secure network of UAV as they have been widely used in hostile environments. Motivated from the aforementioned facts, in this article, we present a broad survey on the architecture, requirements, and use cases of 6G technology. It also presents a solution taxonomy based on the applications of UAV communication. Based on the findings from the survey, we present a blockchain-envisioned security solution and 6G-enabled network connectivity in UAV communication. A summary of future research directions for the integration of blockchain and 6G technology in UAV communications is also presented. Then, we present a case study of a blockchain-envisioned UAV communication using 6G networks to secure Industry 4.0 applications.

Keke Gai, Yulu Wu, Liehuang Zhu, Kim‐Kwang Raymond Choo · 5 authors

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly deployed in networked environments, such as places of mass gatherings, smart cities and smart nations. For example, UAVs can be deployed to detect violations of lockdown, stay-at-home or social / physical distancing directives during pandemics (e.g. COVID-19). There are, however, security and privacy considerations in such deployments. To achieve secure and efficient authentication of UAVs, solutions such as those based on Point-to-Point (P2P) or a Point- to-Multipoint (P2M) communications have been proposed in the literature. In this article, we present a novel blockchain-based technique to support multi-party authentication to facilitate trustworthy group communications. Specifically, this allows us to provide secure P2P wireless communications and trusted group communication management for UAV networks, while ensuring service efficiency. Evaluation findings from both real-world implementation and simulations demonstrate the utility of the proposed approach.

Abbas Yazdinejad, Reza M. Parizi, Ali Dehghantanha, Hadis Karimipour · 6 authors

There is currently widespread use of drones and drone technology due to their rising applications that have come into fruition in the military, safety surveillance, agriculture, smart transportation, shipping, and delivery of packages in our Internet-of-Things global landscape. However, there are security-specific challenges with the authentication of drones while airborne. The current authentication approaches, in most drone-based applications, are subject to latency issues in real time with security vulnerabilities for attacks. To address such issues, we introduce a secure authentication model with low latency for drones in smart cities that looks to leverage blockchain technology. We apply a zone-based architecture in a network of drones, and use a customized decentralized consensus, known as drone-based delegated proof of stake (DDPOS), for drones among zones in a smart city that does not require reauthentication. The proposed architecture aims for positive impacts on increased security and reduced latency on the Internet of Drones (IoD). Moreover, we provide an empirical analysis of the proposed architecture compared to other peer models previously proposed for IoD to demonstrate its performance and security authentication capability. The experimental results clearly show that not only does the proposed architecture have low packet loss rate, high throughput, and low end-to-end delay in comparison to peer models but also can detect 97.5% of attacks by malicious drones while airborne.

Pramod Abichandani, Deepan Lobo, Smit Kabrawala, William A. McIntyre

Ethereum blockchain is a powerful, open-source technology for creating decentralized and secure information sharing systems. The main contribution of this article is the experimental validation of an Ethereum blockchain-based software and hardware architecture that enables secure communication for multiple small unmanned aerial vehicles (sUAVs). The experiments involved three DJI M100 quadrotors that shared images captured during flight based on smart contracts created using Ethereum’s Turing complete programming language. The smart contract was designed so that only the intended recipient sUAV could access a specific image. The effect of image size, difficulty level, and consensus algorithms on image transfer times during flight are noted and point to the feasibility of this system in practical missions. The effects of wireless network disruptions on the Ethereum network are documented. The fully documented smart contract code is open sourced to assist readers in quick prototyping. As efforts for decentralization and security of multirobot systems continue to grow, the system architecture and implementation detailed here may serve as a guide for future research.

Partha Pratim Ray, Kien Nguyen

Medical delivery drones are gradually becoming an inseparable part of smart human society, especially with the emergence of 5G and existing internet of things (IoT). A wide range of medical facilities can be leveraged via drone-based delivery aspects. Being a nascent stage of development, this field of application faces significant drawbacks from reliable and secure e-healthcare. In this paper, we discuss the importance of blockchain to improve decentralization, privacy, and consensus-aware medical product delivery by the drones. We firstly review the background of blockchain, 5G-IoT ecosystem and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Secondly, we review existing UAVs capable of performing medial delivery. We also find whether such drones are technically viable to work accordance to the 5GIoT era. Thirdly, we propose a modified multi-modal aspect behind medical delivery drones under the 5G-IoT assisted blockchain ecosystem. Fourthly, we propose an architecture comprising 5G, IoT, blockchain, and medical delivery drones with extraterrestrial communication support from satellites. Lastly, we discuss key open research challenges and provide a future road map.

Aparna Kumari, Rajesh Gupta, Sudeep Tanwar, Neeraj Kumar

No abstract is available for this record.

Moayad Aloqaily, Ouns Bouachir, Azzedine Boukerche, Ismaeel Al Ridhawi

Fifth generation (5G) wireless networks are designed to meet various end-user quality of service (QoS) requirements through high data rates (typically of gigabits per second) and low latencies. Coupled with fog and mobile edge computing, 5G can achieve high data rates, enabling complex autonomous smart city services such as the large deployment of self-driving vehicles and large-scale artificial-intelligence-enabled industrial manufacturing. However, to meet the exponentially growing number of connected IoT devices and irregular data and service requests in both low- and high-density locations, the process of enacting traditional cells supported through fixed and costly base stations requires rethought to enable on-demand mobile access points in the form of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) for diversified smart city scenarios. This article envisions a 5G network environment that is supported by blockchain-enabled UAVs to meet dynamic user demands with network access supply. The solution enables decentralized service delivery (drones as a service) and routing to and from end users in a reliable and secure manner. Both public and private blockchains are deployed within the UAVs, supported by fog and cloud computing devices and data centers to provide a wide range of complex authenticated service and data availability. Particular attention is paid to comparing data delivery success rates and message exchange in the proposed solution against traditional UAV-supported cellular networks. Challenges and future research are also discussed with highlights on emerging technologies such as federated learning.

Vikas Hassija, Vikas Saxena, Vinay Chamola

5G, blockchain, and drones are potentially revolutionizing future technologies. 5G promises to provide a tactile internet environment to the users. Tactile internet is characterized by ultra-low latency, with high reliability, security, and availability. Few attempts have been made in academia and industry to use drones-mounted small cell base stations. Such flying base stations can be used in disaster areas, emergencies, or in rural areas. The major challenge in deploying such flying base stations is data security. Drones being resource-constrained devices cannot be overloaded with heavy security algorithms. Moreover, the decision of user association, drone movement, and bandwidth allocation are major bottlenecks in deploying such networks. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based security framework for drone mounted base stations in the tactile internet environment. Furthermore, a game-theoretic model is proposed as a smart contract to decide on the dynamic bandwidth allocation to different users based on bandwidth availability and cost. Numerical results show that the proposed model helps in better user experience in terms of bandwidth allocation in low network areas.

Elias Ghribi, Tala Talaei Khoei, Hamed Taheri Gorji, Prakash Ranganathan · 5 authors

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks offer enormous potential in civil, commercial, and military applications. As network sizes become large, the communication of UAV networks poses serious cybersecurity challenges. One solution for providing a secure, scalable communication mechanism is to integrate blockchain in the peer-to-peer UAV networks. Blockchain provides a way for multiple entities to communicate securely in a decentralized and cooperative manner. Because blockchain is primarily used for preventing double-spending in cryptocurrency, it lacks methods to secure communications in a network. Specifically, this paper proposes a novel consensus-building mechanism for securing communications in a UAV network, integrating blockchain with public key cryptography method Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman and one-time pad encryption method.

Rajesh Gupta, Arpit Shukla, Parimal Mehta, Pronaya Bhattacharya · 7 authors

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is used in various smart applications, such as defense, civilian, and healthcare services. As data in these applications flow through an open channel, i.e., the Internet, so security and privacy always a challenging issue. Though many solutions exist for this problem in literature, but these solutions are not adequate to handle security, privacy, latency, and efficient real-time delivery of healthcare services remotely over the wireless communication channel. Moreover, the existing UAV systems have security, reliability, latency, and storage cost issues, which restricts their applicability shortly. Motivated from these facts, this paper proposes VAHAK, an Ethereum Blockchain (BC) based secure outdoor healthcare medical supplies using UAVs. VAHAK provides reliable communication between the UAVs and the entities in a decentralized manner, which ensures the early delivery of required medical supplies to the critical patients. In VAHAK, security, privacy, and reliability issues have been resolved using Ethereum smart contract (ESC), while storage cost issues are handled with IPFS protocol. The security vulnerabilities of the VAHAK are tested on MyThril open-source tool. VAHAK is efficient in terms of data storage cost as it uses the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) for healthcare record storage and 5G-enabled Tactile Internet (TI) for communication, respectively. Finally, VAHAK performance evaluation demonstrates its effectiveness as compared to the traditional systems where it outperforms the existing schemes with respect to various performance evaluation metrics, such as scalability, latency, and network bandwidth.

Maninderpal Singh, Gagangeet Singh Aujla, Rasmeet Singh Bali

The Internet of Drones (IoD) is an environment, which facilitates the autonomous and hybrid (semi-autonomous) operations of drones. Due to this advantage, the drones have paved their way into every segment (almost) across the world. Whatever be the application (warfare, surveillance, photography, rescue, delivery, etc), the transmission of data (to and fro) occur between the drones and the other infrastructure over wireless channels. While on the move, this data (operational or service-related) is vulnerable to several security risks and attacks. Hence, the maintenance of the confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity of the data is the primary goal in the IoD environment. Recently, the blockchain, a distributed ledger-based technology is being popularly adapted to store the data immutably, making it a possible solution to handle the above-raised issues. But, there are several challenges with conventional blockchain architecture, which make it difficult to adapt it in its current form. Firstly, the blockchain works by building trust in the trust-less environment by using a consensus mechanism. Secondly, the blockchain inherently involves a large number of network communication operations to synchronize the peer-to-peer network. Even more, the bigger the blockchain grows, the more is the data flowing across the network and so does the challenges. Therefore, to overcome these problems, ODOB: One Drone One Block-based Lightweight Blockchain Architecture for IoD is proposed. ODOB decouples the data part (or block ledger) from the block header to form a distributed architecture. This architecture couple the drones with an individual amendable block (each drone can access only their own block), thereby making it simple, trustworthy, and lightweight. ODOB is evaluated for several parameters and the results obtained favor the proposed architecture.

Basudeb Bera, Sourav Saha, Ashok Kumar Das, Neeraj Kumar · 6 authors

The Internet of Drones (IoD) is widely used in a wide range of applications from military to civilian applications from the past years. However, during communication either with the control room/ground station server(s) or moving access points in the sky, security and privacy is one the crucial issues which needs to be tackled efficiently. In this direction, blokchain technology can be one of the viable solutions due to the immutability and traceability of various transactions and decentralized nature. In this paper, we provide in-depth challenges and issues of applicability of blokchain in 5G-based Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled IoD environment. We propose and analyze a new blokchain based secure framework for data management among IoD communication entities. The proposed scheme has ability to resist several potential attacks that are essential in IoT-enabled IoD environment. A detailed comparative analysis exhibits that the proposed scheme offers better security and functionality requirements, and also provides less communication and computation overheads as compared to other related schemes.