A Digital Twins Enabled Reputation System for Microchain-based UAV Networks

There is a growing proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks because of their capabilities to provide intelligent services to meet the highly diversified requirements resulting from abundant smart city scenarios. Meanwhile, reliability, security, and privacy are still among the top concerns of the public and UAV developers. The conventional centralized network architecture cannot ensure device authentication, data integrity, and privacy preservation in highly dynamic, flexible UAV networks. In this paper, we present a novel DIgital Twins-Enabled Reputation (DITER) system for microchain-based UAV networks. The DITER framework is comprised of three layers: (1) the physical UAV network that is strengthened by a microchain, a lightweight blockchain architecture, to secure the data flows; (2) the reputation system that is implemented in the virtual space using the logic objects; and (3) a Digital Twins (DT) platform that bridges the physical world and the virtual space. We hope this conceptualized DITER framework inspires discussions and sparks new ideas in this area of UAV security and privacy-preserving design.