A Blockchain-Based Secure Crowd Monitoring System Using UAV Swarm

Intelligent UAV-based monitoring systems are becoming an essential apparatus for crowd monitoring as they have proven to be viable and cost-effective solutions. Applications of such systems may include detecting antisocial and abnormal behavior among a crowd to ensure public safety and security, especially during periods of pandemic or social unrest when technology is aimed at replacing the human factor to ensure scalability and reduce risk. On the other hand, the modern architectures of autonomous UAV-based systems requires processing the captured information at the edge and cloud facilities, which requires transmission and/or retransmission of the captured data. This vulnerability of data security during transmission may compromise the benefits of the technology. Therefore, there is need for an effective strategy to achieve a secure architecture that takes into consideration the limited computing capabilities onboard the UAV agents and the distributed nature of the system. Blockchain, as a distributed network technology, will provide a safe, transparent, and efficient network system for UAV systems. Therefore, this article proposes a drone-swarm-aided distributed monitoring system in a blockchain-powered network. In the proposed monitoring mechanism, the security protocol and encryption algorithm are applied to ensure the security of each stage of the system, so as to realize the cooperative drone swarm to reliably perform monitoring tasks. The blockchain technology is introduced to achieve tamper-proof monitoring log recording and support group decision making of monitoring transactions.