An advanced Internet-of-Drones System with Blockchain for improving quality of service of Search and Rescue: A feasibility study

Abstract

<p>Drone-based systems supporting Search and Rescue (SAR) missions help expeditiously improve the possibility of discovering the missing victims. Nonetheless, the current drone-based systems have some limitations, such as the need for humans in control of large-scale drones, drone’s energy inefficiency, repercussion of quality of service (QoS) from abnormalities events, shortages of automaticity and real-time interactions, deficiency of swift decisions from artificial intelligence-based SAR, and underestimation of security issues in SAR systems. Therefore, developing a more advanced drone-based system is necessary to overcome these limitations. However, it is challenging to achieve the target due to trade-off relationships of technologies and strict requirements of time-critical SAR. This paper studies the feasibility of an Internet-of-Drones (IoD) system using <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/blockchain" title="Learn more about blockchain from ScienceDirect's AI-generated Topic Pages">blockchain</a> and <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/artificial-intelligence" title="Learn more about artificial intelligence from ScienceDirect's AI-generated Topic Pages">artificial intelligence</a> at the edge to overcome limitations and improve SAR QoS. An advanced IoD <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/system-architecture" title="Learn more about system architecture from ScienceDirect's AI-generated Topic Pages">system architecture</a> from drones to a back-end system and end-users terminals has been proposed. Furthermore, advanced edge services and artificial intelligence at the edge have been presented for automatically searching for missing persons. In addition, <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/computation-offloading" title="Learn more about computation offloading from ScienceDirect's AI-generated Topic Pages">computation offloading</a> approaches have been provided to improve the energy efficiency of drones and reduce system latency. Last but not least, public and private blockchain, including <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/ethereum" title="Learn more about Ethereum from ScienceDirect's AI-generated Topic Pages">Ethereum</a> and Hyperledger Fabric, for providing secure and decentralized healthcare platform has been investigated and analyzed to enable real-time interaction between healthcare entities and improves <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/healthcare-service" title="Learn more about healthcare services from ScienceDirect's AI-generated Topic Pages">healthcare services</a>. The results show that the proposed system helps overcome the limitations and improve the SAR QoS. Besides, the proposed system satisfies the security requirements, including confidentiality, integrity, <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/authentication" title="Learn more about authentication from ScienceDirect's AI-generated Topic Pages">authentication</a>, authorization, access control, privacy, trust, transparency, availability, automaticity, and tolerance.<br></p>