Blockchain-Empowered Drone Networks: Architecture, Features, and Future

The future mobile communication system is expected to provide ubiquitous connectivity and unprecedented services over billions of devices. The flying drone, also known as unmanned aerial vehicle, is prominent in its flexibility and low cost, and has emerged as a significant network entity to realize such ambitious targets. However, the distributed nature makes the operation of a large-scale drone network confront many challenges, such as vulnerability to security threats and privacy leakage. To address these problems, in this article, we propose to utilize the blockchain concept to the development of drone network. Under the proposed blockchain-empowered drone networks (BeDrone), drones that are deployed for service provisioning can act as the miners of blockchain, and acquire the computing resources from each other or an edge computing node whenever needed. Recommendations and future research directions for designing BeDrone are introduced with a focus on the game theoretic incentive mechanism for resource allocation and acquisition. Performance evaluations are conducted to illustrate the benefits of the proposed architecture on developing blockchain-envisioned drones.