ODOB: One Drone One Block-based Lightweight Blockchain Architecture for Internet of Drones

The Internet of Drones (IoD) is an environment, which facilitates the autonomous and hybrid (semi-autonomous) operations of drones. Due to this advantage, the drones have paved their way into every segment (almost) across the world. Whatever be the application (warfare, surveillance, photography, rescue, delivery, etc), the transmission of data (to and fro) occur between the drones and the other infrastructure over wireless channels. While on the move, this data (operational or service-related) is vulnerable to several security risks and attacks. Hence, the maintenance of the confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity of the data is the primary goal in the IoD environment. Recently, the blockchain, a distributed ledger-based technology is being popularly adapted to store the data immutably, making it a possible solution to handle the above-raised issues. But, there are several challenges with conventional blockchain architecture, which make it difficult to adapt it in its current form. Firstly, the blockchain works by building trust in the trust-less environment by using a consensus mechanism. Secondly, the blockchain inherently involves a large number of network communication operations to synchronize the peer-to-peer network. Even more, the bigger the blockchain grows, the more is the data flowing across the network and so does the challenges. Therefore, to overcome these problems, ODOB: One Drone One Block-based Lightweight Blockchain Architecture for IoD is proposed. ODOB decouples the data part (or block ledger) from the block header to form a distributed architecture. This architecture couple the drones with an individual amendable block (each drone can access only their own block), thereby making it simple, trustworthy, and lightweight. ODOB is evaluated for several parameters and the results obtained favor the proposed architecture.