Digital Twin-Driven Trust Management in Open RAN-Based Spatial Crowdsourcing Drone Services

Abstract

We introduce “TMIoDT,” a pioneering framework aimed at bolstering communication security in the Internet of Drone Things (IoDT) integrated with Open Radio Access Networks (Open RAN), with a specific focus on bushfire monitoring applications. Our novel contributions include the seamless integration of digital twin technology with blockchain to establish a robust trust management system in the IoDT context. This approach addresses the critical vulnerabilities associated with unsecured wireless networks in IoDT, such as data integrity issues and susceptibility to cyber threats. The TMIoDT framework encompasses a mutual authentication mechanism to secure interactions and key exchanges among IoDT entities, including drones and Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs). Furthermore, it leverages blockchain technology for credible trust management and employs digital twins to model UGV servers accurately, enhancing IoDT relationship modeling. An advanced Intrusion Detection System (IDS), utilizing Stacked Variational Autoencoder (SVA) and Attention-based Bidirectional LSTM (ABL), is implemented for anomaly detection, complemented by a blockchain-based transaction writing scheme for secure data verification. Our comprehensive evaluation, utilizing the ToN-IoT and ICIDS-2017 network intrusion datasets, confirms TMIoDT’s effectiveness in significantly improving communication security and reliability in IoDT.