SABEC: Secure and Adaptive Blockchain-Enabled Coordination Protocol for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles(UAVs) Network

Hulya Dogan, Anton Setzer

2025

Abstract

The rapid advancement of drone swarm technology has unlocked a multitude of applications across diverse industrial sectors, including surveillance, delivery services, disaster management, and environmental monitoring. Despite these promising prospects, ensuring secure and efficient communication and coordination among drones within a swarm remains a significant challenge. Key obstacles include maintaining efficiency, facilitating the seamless sharing of sensing data, and achieving robust consensus in the presence of Byzantine drones—malicious or faulty UAVs capable of disrupting swarm operations and leading to catastrophic outcomes. To address these challenges, we introduce SABEC (Secure and Adaptive Blockchain-Enabled Coordination Protocol), an innovative blockchain-based approach designed to manage multi-drone collaboration during swarm operations. SABEC improves the security of the consensus achievement process by integrating an efficient blockchain into the UAV network, coupled with a practical and dynamic consensus mechanism. The protocol incentivizes network devices through a scoring system, requiring UAVs to solve intricate problems employing the Proof of Work (PoW) with Fuzzy C-Modes clustering algorithm. Leader UAVs are dynamically selected within clusters based on a predefined threshold, tasked with transmitting status control information about neighbouring UAVs to a cloud server. The server consolidates these data through a robust consensus mechanism, relaying them to the network coordination tier where decision-making consensus is reached, and the data are immutably stored on the blockchain. To facilitate the dynamic and adaptive construction of configurable trusted networks, SABEC employs a consensus protocol based on the blockchain-assisted storage. Comparative experiments conducted using NS3 simulation software demonstrate SABEC's significant advantages over traditional routing and consensus protocols in terms of packet delivery rate, coordination overhead, and average end-to-end delay. These improvements collectively enhance the fault tolerance of UAV networks, ensuring high availability and reliability even in the presence of adversarial nodes. By augmenting the security of consensus achievement, SABEC substantially improves connectivity, security and efficiency within intelligent systems, thereby elevating the potential and stability of multi-drone applications in real-world scenarios.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Dogan H. and Setzer A. (2025). SABEC: Secure and Adaptive Blockchain-Enabled Coordination Protocol for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles(UAVs) Network. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ICISSP; ISBN 978-989-758-735-1, SciTePress, pages 377-388. DOI: 10.5220/0013330500003899

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icissp25,
author={Hulya Dogan and Anton Setzer},
title={SABEC: Secure and Adaptive Blockchain-Enabled Coordination Protocol for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles(UAVs) Network},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ICISSP},
year={2025},
pages={377-388},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013330500003899},
isbn={978-989-758-735-1},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ICISSP
TI - SABEC: Secure and Adaptive Blockchain-Enabled Coordination Protocol for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles(UAVs) Network
SN - 978-989-758-735-1
AU - Dogan H.
AU - Setzer A.
PY - 2025
SP - 377
EP - 388
DO - 10.5220/0013330500003899
PB - SciTePress