Blockchain- UAV Application

In the industrial 4.0 environment, all programs should be as intelligent and automated as possible. The recent rising UAV technology has had a huge impact on industry 4.0. Drones are nowadays used in various industries such as transportation, manufacturing, manufacturing, and packaging delivery. It is estimated that the application of commercial unmanned aerial vehicles will exceed the market of 100 billion US dollars by 2021. The Drone II 2019 application report contains more than 730 use cases from more than 80 companies, distributed in more than 100 countries. It can be seen that unmanned aerial vehicles have great potential in the industrial field.
We will focus on the special case of a small UAV, which is used to transport parcels, food or other goods from one place to another. Transportation is the fifth largest industry of UAV application in 2019. Since 2013, transport operators all over the world have been committed to UAV package delivery. Companies like Mattel (Matternet) and flingerey have been using unmanned aerial vehicles to deliver medicines to rural areas, including relief supplies. Established companies such as Amazon, Google and Fedex have been using unmanned aerial vehicles to obtain cheaper mail and parcel delivery services. For those areas without road infrastructure, unmanned aerial vehicles will be the first choice. Unmanned aerial vehicles can stock presentation medicines, goods and other lightweight products to remote areas through the unmanned aerial vehicle network. Compared with building a long road infrastructure, the cost of unmanned aerial vehicle network is only a small part of the former.
To achieve the above use cases, the UAV must be connected to a fast and reliable cellular network (to connect and control the UAV). Mobile networks are ideal for low-altitude and UAV networks. Mobile spectrum can provide wide-area, high-quality and secure connections to enhance the security of UAV communication. With 5G technology, these communications will become more efficient and faster. UAVs that support 5G will have larger bandwidth, lower latency (<1 millisecond) and higher reliability (≤ 99.999%).
In addition to the benefits of 5G, it also has some unsolved shortcomings (security and privacy issues). The main purpose of UAV communication security attacks is to control and steal its data, or to extract its positioning sensor in the attack vector, as shown in Figure 1. The attack vector is divided into three layers: (I) data acquisition layer,(ii) UAV control layer and (iii) monitoring layer. The top layer is the data monitoring layer, which has ground military systems. It obtains data from the sensors of the UAV and takes actions accordingly. The bottom layer has sensors, including position, airspeed, ultrasonic wave, camera and temperature sensor. This layer is called the data collection layer. The middle layer is called the UAV control layer, which obtains data from the bottom layer and transfers it to the ground military system, and executes the instructions received by the ground military system at the same time. Finally, there is also a UAV remote control on this layer, which is necessary in emergency situations, such as autopilot failure or too complex environment to navigate without experienced pilots and human reactions. This vector shows possible attacks on unmanned aerial vehicles. Some high-risk attacks that may exist in 5G communication include midmen, injection, sniffing, GPS spoofing, and denial of service, as shown in Figure 1.
A feasible solution to overcome the above security problems is to integrate the block chain (BC) into the UAV network through 5G communication channel. It has the following advantages:(1)BC system adopts decentralized mechanism and 5G communication network, and the data access speed is faster. (<1 millisecond delay);(2) since all participating miner nodes are verifying the reliability of packet delivery (99.999% reliability), the reliability of packet delivery will be higher;(3) the high data availability of BC networks supporting 5G is distributed ledger;(4) fault-tolerant network, because each miner node has a complete copy of Ledger;(5) in package delivery, the self-executing digital SCs between the sender and the receiver eliminates the need of the third-party system;(6) because the entry is essentially immutable, the receiver cannot reject or update the package order details;(7) resist data modification attacks (immutability), Mims attacks (only participating members can view or add transactions), and sybil attacks (all participating nodes can add new miner nodes after verification). The architecture of the UAV-based package delivery system is shown in figure 2.
It is divided into three layers, namely (I) seller layer,(ii) network layer and (iii) buyer layer. The buyer layer requests products from the seller layer through the 5G communication channel through the BC network through the Ethereum client. The SC between the buyer and the seller layer settles the payment before the seller layer initiates the delivery. Then, the seller starts product delivery with encrypted data (sender address, destination address, path node and UAV real-time location). Then, execute the SC again and verify the terms and conditions stated between the buyer and the seller. After the data is verified, the details are stored in the BC network. The data in the BC network is very secure (records are immutable), reliable (data is stored after verification by all participating nodes), and easy to track (new updates are added to blocks). The addition of 5G communication channel reduces the delay of the package delivery system. Its uRLLC component can manage latency to <1ms.