Fusion of blockchain and artificial intelligence for secure drone networking underlying 5G communications

Abstract

Nowadays, the exponential increase in the usage of drones in various realms of societal and military applications necessitates advancements and stability in drone communication. Drones have proven their potential in providing real‐time cost‐efficient solutions for several applications like healthcare, smart grid surveillance, smart city monitoring, and border surveillance. Though it has many security and privacy issues, researchers across the globe have given numerous solutions to protect drone communication from cyber‐attacks. Most of these solutions were based on cryptographic techniques and are highly compute extensive. There exist few blockchain‐based solutions, which suffer from high transaction storage costs with communication reliability, latency, and bandwidth issues. Motivated by these facts, in this paper, we present a comprehensive survey to secure drone communication and propose a blockchain‐based secure and intelligent drone communication architecture underlying 5G communication network and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. The proposed architecture uses an InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) as a platform for data storage, which ensures improved network performance, communication security and privacy, and reduces transaction storage cost. Further, it facilitates efficient drone communication in providing dynamic, flexible, and on‐the‐fly decisions competencies through 5G and AI technologies. Then, we incorporate a healthcare‐based case study using the proposed architecture. At last, future research challenges and directions are emphasized for improvement in this research area.

Internet of Things (IoT)-Enabled Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for the Inspection of Construction Sites: A Vision and Future Directions

“…ere are several solutions that are based on blockchain which addresses the limitations such that high transaction storage, latency in response, communication with ground control room (GCR), and lastly the bandwidth. Keeping this in mind, researchers have proposed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with secure communication protocol in compliance with the recent architecture of 5G communication and the power of artificial intelligence [103]. e techniques such as InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) facilitate nowadays the storage limitation and provide better network performance and security.…”

Survey of Promising Technologies for Quantum Drones and Networks

“…A recent study on the reliability of drone networks developed and implemented in a healthcare-based research study, a Blockchain-based architectural design employing a 5G communications system and AI [160]. The authors used a systematic literature review and case study.…”

“…The integration of drones with Blockchain and AI technologies also has the capacity to solve communication security questions. The extant literature is focused on 5Gbased drone communication, and drone communication lacks a more precise understanding of Blockchain and AI potentials in quantum drones applications [160]. Improvements in ML will provide solutions that could further be used for QAI practitioners' sophisticated creations [153].…”

“…For this reason, future studies are needed to upgrade embedded hardware technology and to develop efficient deep learning frameworks. Furthermore, exciting unresolved issues regarding the integration of drones with Blockchain, AI, QAI, and 5G remain intact [166]. For example, (i) in terms of information privacy, there is an urgent need to develop new solutions to provide data privacy to Blockchain participants.…”

Recent Advances in Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence Integration: Feasibility Analysis, Research Issues, Applications, Challenges, and Future Work

“…However, there is still a lack of generalization and summarization of the work on their integration, and the correlation between the two is not yet reflected. Existing literature shows that researchers pay attention to the combination of blockchain and artificial intelligence for application in a variety of vertical fields and business [14][15][16][17][18]. In contrast, this paper analyzes the feasibility of the combination of blockchain and artificial intelligence from a more comprehensive and three-dimensional perspective, and extensively collect and demonstrate the combination points of the two in various research fields.…”