Sharding-Enabled Blockchain for Software-Defined Internet of Unmanned Vehicles in the Battlefield

The Internet of Unmanned Vehicles (IoUV) is regarded as an emerging technology for military applications not only to make surveillance systems and battlefield operations fully coordinated and automated, but also to provide significant strategic advantages. All the UVs form a coordinated network for exchanging information in IoUV, which enhances context awareness and risk analysis, and improves response time to make the mission effective. This article provides a perspective of fusion of blockchain technology with software defined IoUV, also known as extended 5G, for the battlefield scenario. Software defined IoUV dynamically configures the network parameters and provides network visibility for better security and manageability of the network in IoUV. Block-chain technology helps to provide trustworthy command and control operations in IoUV and stores those operations in tamper-resistant digital ledgers in the form of transactions. Unmanned vehicles (UVs) with high computing, storage, battery life and transmission power act as miners that validate every transaction and are responsible for creating blocks of the blockchain. However, current blockchain technology suffers from scalability; thus, we propose sharding-enabled blockchain to address the issue where shards of lightweight UVs maintain the required number of miners/ auditors to handle the issues when a miner gets destroyed or damaged in the battlefield. Some participating UVs are used as wireless stations to provide persistent wireless connectivity in IoUV. The proposed framework aims to increase the trust and accountability, and to reduce business friction among different units involved in the battlefield.