Secure 5G-Assisted UAV Access Scheme in IoBT for Region Demarcation and Surveillance Operations

This article proposes a generic scheme that integrates blockchain (BC) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) through a fifth-generation (5G) Tactile Internet (TI) service to leverage responsive and secure communications in the Internet-of-Battlefield-Things (IoBT)-based ecosystems. UAVs are deployed with camera sensors to monitor and transfer ultra-high resolution (UHR) images and real-time live video feeds of region demarcation and surveillance to ground control stations (GCS). Currently, UAVs operate through Long-Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) services and face bottlenecks in terms of bandwidth and end latency for live feeds. As the feed is sent through open channels, it is vulnerable to security attacks by an adversary. The proposed scheme addresses the dual issues of responsive network orchestration, and induces trust, immutability, and transparency in shared data among UAVs and GCSs via BC as a key solution. Through a case study, the scheme is compared to baseline LTE services. In the simulation, transactions through BC achieve 31.85 percent improvement over cloud-based GCS, an average frame loss of 18.42 percent in 5G-TI compared to 94.07 percent in 4G-LTE-A channel, and processing latency of 0.1061 s in 5G-TI, compared to 2.2133 s in 4G-LTE, which indicates the viability of the proposed scheme.