Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Traffic Management Solution Using Crowd-Sensing and Blockchain

Unmanned aerial vehicles are gaining immense attention in diverse commercial and civil applications. However, adopting this technology will rely on management services that support safe operation. UAV traffic management systems (UTM) aim to facilitate safe, efficient, and fair access to the low-altitude airspace. However, these systems are centralized and lack protocols for secure interaction between the system agents such as authorities, service providers, and end-users. Another limitation of proposed UTM architectures is the absence of efficient mechanisms to enforce airspace rules and regulations. To address these issues, we present a decentralized UTM protocol that controls access to airspace and ensures the security objectives of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. For this purpose, we exploit features of the blockchain and smart-contract technologies. In addition, we employ a mobile crowdsensing technique to seamlessly enforce airspace rules and regulations that govern UAV operations. The solution is implemented on top of the Ethereum platform and evaluated using four different tools for smart-contract verification. We also provide security and performance analysis of the solution. For reproducibility, we made our implementation publicly available on Github.