Blockchain enabled verification for cellular-connected unmanned aircraft system networking

摘要

The emerging 5G New Radio (5G NR) stimulates the evolution of applications in many fields. Compared with 4G, 5G NR can provide much more reliable, efficient, flexible networking access services to mobile devices which can escalate the quality of services (QoS) for the users remarkably. The advantages of affordability, easy assembling and quick driving, allow the deployment of Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) on a large scale, and provide the elevation for the industrial and the civilian implementations ubiquitously. With the enhancement of cellular networking, the control range of UAS can extend significantly which allows the controller finish their mission far away from workplace and prevents the threats derived from the hazards in the uncertain environment. The Base Stations (BSs) are vital to the cellular-connected UAS because the BSs can provide the Internet access for the UAS and the remote controllers that sends instructions to the UAS and backhauls the packets to the controllers precisely and timely. However, the malicious BSs are great threats to the cellular-connected UAS. Specifically, the malicious BSs are scattered in the legislative BSs and cannot provide formal networking access services to the UAS. What is worse, the attackers can leverage the malicious BSs to disclose the controllers' privacy and set threats to the public property. In this paper, we propose a novel blockchain-based approach to mitigate the threats from accessing the malicious BSs. We implement the consensus construction on the authentication of networking access to enhance the efficiency of verification between BSs. To achieve the security of cellular connected UAS, we deploy blockchain to maintain the high online rate for accessing networking. Apart from the prevention of accessing malicious BSs, our approach can detect the malicious BSs and eliminate the proportion of the malicious BSs in the cellular networking. The evaluation shows that the proposed approach outperforms the conventional point-to-point authentication method. Concurrently, we enhanced the verification between BSs and the cellular-connected UAS. Our proposed blockchain enabled verification for cellular UAS networking has high potentials to rise the efficiency and the security of the UAS deployment on a large scale.