A trust-based mechanism for drones in smart cities

Abstract

Smart cities equipped with intelligent devices can enhance the lifestyle and quality of humans by automatically and collaboratively acting as a sustainable resource to the ecosystem. In addition, the technological advancement can be further empowered by interconnecting various types of technologies, such as IoT, Artificial Intelligence, drones and robotics which will clearly improve the Quality of Services, energy efficiency and connectivity to the overall system. The integration of drones hovering over smart cities with the other devices in the smart city network brings a lot of benefits. However, it can also lead to various security and privacy concerns in the network. The aim of this article is to put forward a secure and safe smart city communication environment by proposing a trust establishment scheme for the ad hoc Unmanned Aerial Vehicles network. In which, malicious devices can be traced and blocked by analysing and evaluating their historical interactions within the system and calculating their trust values. A behaviour-based and local trust value scheme is used to analyse the trust of each communicating device that is further associated with a blockchain distributed ledger. The proposed mechanism is measured over various networking and security metrics, including throughput, latency, accuracy and block updating compared to the existing state-of-the-art solutions.