A Novel Internet-of-Drones and Blockchain-based System Architecture for Search and Rescue

Abstract

With the development in information and communications technology (ICT) and drones such as Internet-of-Things (IoT), edge computing, image processing, and autonomous drones, solutions supporting search and rescue (SAR) missions can be developed with more intelligent capabilities. In most of the drone and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) based systems supporting SAR missions, several drones deployed in different areas acquire images and videos that are sent to a ground control station (GCS) for processing and detecting a missing person. Although this offers many advantages, such as easy management and deployment, the approach still has many limitations. For example, when a connection between a drone and a GCS has some problems, the quality of service cannot be maintained. Many drone and UAV-based systems do not support flexibility, transparency, security, and traceability. In this paper, we propose a novel Internet-of-Drones (IoD) architecture using blockchain technology. We implement the proposed architecture with different drones, edge servers, and a Hyperledger blockchain network. The proof-of-concept design demonstrates that the proposed architecture can offer high-level services such as prolonging the operating time of a drone, improving the capability of detecting humans accurately, and a high level of transparency, traceability, and security.

Blockchain for the Cybersecurity of Smart City Applications

“…Nguyen et al [192] present a system in which drones are grouped into clusters where each cluster contains a drone leader. The latter is selected as one of the powerful drones in the cluster.…”

“…Leaders gather, manage, and send important information to the edge servers, and the latter use the RAFT consensus algorithm to organize and store the BC. Unlike the system in [192], Tan et al [242] propose a model that makes use of the cluster heads (CH) as BC miners. The cluster drones save only the BC state, which includes the list of cluster members.…”