Secure Data Sharing in UAV-assisted Crowdsensing: Integration of Blockchain and Reputation Incentive

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) combining with crowdsensing technology has been viewed as a promising paradigm for performing sensing tasks in extreme scenarios such as earthquakes, etc. However, potential security issues could incur on data sharing between UAVs and task publishers owing to the vulnerability of central nodes and selfishness of distrusted UAVs. To cope with these problems, we propose a novel blockchain-based crowdsensing framework with reputation incentive (BCFR) in UAV-assisted mobile crowdsensing. Specifically, we first propose a novel reputation incentive scheme to choose UAVs with a high reputation to perform sensing tasks, thereby protecting data sharing between UAVs and task publishers from internal attack (i.e., some UAVs with insufficient resources may turn into malicious UAVs to provide wrong sensory data to the task publishers). Then, we design a blockchain-based secure data transmission scheme to securely record data transactions of UAVs. Furthermore, since UAVs with limited resources are difficult to perform compute-intensive mining tasks, edge computing is incorporated to increase the success probability of block creation. The interactions between UAVs and edge computing provider (ECP) are modeled as a two-stage Stackelberg game to motivate UAVs participating in the block creation process while providing high-quality services. Finally, we conduct extensive simulations to demonstrate that the proposed BCFR scheme can effectively improve successful mining probabilities and utilities of UAVs, and ensure the security of data sharing among UAVs and task publishers.