VAHAK: A Blockchain-based Outdoor Delivery Scheme using UAV for Healthcare 4.0 Services

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is used in various smart applications, such as defense, civilian, and healthcare services. As data in these applications flow through an open channel, i.e., the Internet, so security and privacy always a challenging issue. Though many solutions exist for this problem in literature, but these solutions are not adequate to handle security, privacy, latency, and efficient real-time delivery of healthcare services remotely over the wireless communication channel. Moreover, the existing UAV systems have security, reliability, latency, and storage cost issues, which restricts their applicability shortly. Motivated from these facts, this paper proposes VAHAK, an Ethereum Blockchain (BC) based secure outdoor healthcare medical supplies using UAVs. VAHAK provides reliable communication between the UAVs and the entities in a decentralized manner, which ensures the early delivery of required medical supplies to the critical patients. In VAHAK, security, privacy, and reliability issues have been resolved using Ethereum smart contract (ESC), while storage cost issues are handled with IPFS protocol. The security vulnerabilities of the VAHAK are tested on MyThril open-source tool. VAHAK is efficient in terms of data storage cost as it uses the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) for healthcare record storage and 5G-enabled Tactile Internet (TI) for communication, respectively. Finally, VAHAK performance evaluation demonstrates its effectiveness as compared to the traditional systems where it outperforms the existing schemes with respect to various performance evaluation metrics, such as scalability, latency, and network bandwidth.