Blockchain-enabled secure communication for drone delivery: a case study in COVID-like scenarios

COVID-19 made the world stop, with people trapped inside their homes and governments trying to restrict the public movement. However, to accomplish this, one big problem that emerged and outscored everything else was catering to the day to day necessary items of the people without human involvement. In this regard, we propose a blockchain-enabled secure communication framework for delivering the goods in COVID-19 like scenarios by leveraging the drones that are available with commercial retail providers. The blockchain scheme is used to create smart contracts to build the trust of buyers and sellers on the framework as the payments are made through the smart contract executions. The blockchain based order processing ensures the integrity and authenticity of the information. Moreover, a communication model is presented along with the order, delivery and payment phases. The results prove the effectiveness of the proposed scheme by evaluating it based on gas price, transaction time, and mining time.