Guest Editorial: Blockchain Envisioned Drones: Realizing 5G-Enabled Flying Automation

Nowadays the deployment of drones/UAVs is not just limited to military and defense establishments; they are also widely deployed in geo-dispersed applications (environmental monitoring, rescue operation monitoring, road and traffic surveillance, natural disaster monitoring, soil and crop analysis, and consumer product delivery). Drones have become the instigators and enablers of global mechanization. For example, the influx of precocious drones is recognizable looking at the high angled photography of peculiar landscapes. Likewise, multiple drones coordinate and collaborate with each other to form a web of flying computing resources which can sense, analyze, and transmit data to remote cloud servers and storage spaces. Even more, the popularity of next generation communication technologies has opened a new vertical in the form of 5G-en-abled flying automation using drones. This new dimension for drone communication has attracted the wide attention of the academia, research and industrial communities. 5G-enabled flying automation empowers the astronomically large numbers of connected things in a drone-enabled smart ecosystem to communicate among themselves and thereafter decisively handle the progressively intricate traffic conditions.