Blockchain-Assisted UAV Data Free-Boundary Spatial Querying and Authenticated Sharing

The flexibility and low cost of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offer great potential for them in areas such as disaster relief, energy line inspection, and traffic monitoring. Multiple UAVs form an airborne UAV network to share geo-tagged observation data for better collaborative missions. Blockchain can solve the security threats caused by the environment’s untrustworthiness and the UAV networks’ openness. However, the key to sharing data in blockchain-assisted UAV networks is identifying and understanding observational data and providing authentication query services in free boundary spatial. This paper proposes a blockchain-assisted UAV network data-sharing framework based on Non-Fungible Token (NFT). First, we design a marking and describing data method based on NFT to help geo-tagged data be effectively understood. Moreover, we propose a free-boundary spatial index tree to manage data and provide efficient queries. Furthermore, combined with the consensus mechanism and the blockchain transaction tree, the proposed sharing framework can provide query results authentication. Compared with the existing schemes, analysis and experiments demonstrate that our scheme could support the arbitrary expansion of UAV flight range and the random distribution of observation data in space, save at least 22% of storage overhead and reduce more than 36% of query time overhead.