UAV-Coin: Blockchain assisted UAV as a Service

The vast majority of 5G users are in eMBB content which requires high bandwidth and moderate latency under a few milliseconds. Today's applications are irregular and not predictable and current fixed wireless access cannot meet these requirements of eMBB traffic. This leads to the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as mobile base stations to increase the capacity of physical infrastructure. However; due to serving eMBB users, the replacement of UAVs for recharging becomes frequent. There are many studies proposing to increase the serving time without any replacement in the literature. Due to the economic limitations of service providers, they prefer partial recovery on the topology. All of these leads use UAV as a service between multi-providers by hiring it from infrastructure on-demand. On the other hand, security is an urgent requirement of 5G while integrating multi-providers. Therefore, this paper proposes blockchain-assisted UAV as a service to handle the smart contracts between providers and UAVs in exchange for UAV-Coin. Thanks to that, multi-providers can hire a UAV on-demand to enhance network capacity without any full recovery on the physical topology. This is implemented by using edge servers that execute UAV, Content, and Database manager modules, respectively. The proof algorithm for blockchain-assisted UAVaaS is proposed. Here, the Proof of Stake (PoS) is preferred for the validation of transactions and adding them into a blockchain in order to meet the latency requirement of eMBB content. According to performance evaluation, the blockchain can be used by up to 10 service providers while considering the processing delay. Moreover, the service providers can earn much more UAV-Coin by being selected as a winner more than once for validation in proof of algorithm.