LECast: A Low-Energy-Consumption Broadcast Protocol for UAV Blockchain Networks

Abstract

With the continuous development of communication technology, drones are playing an important role in many fields, such as power transmission line inspection and agricultural pesticide spraying. In order to protect the data privacy and communication security of drones, many experts are considering blockchain as its enabling technology. However, due to their small size and limited power storage, drones cannot support energy-intensive blockchain applications. In addition, the future 6G communications need to implement an important key performance indicator, namely extremely low-power communications (ELPCs). As a consequence, research into green blockchain is becoming more and more popular. The broadcast of the blockchain is one of the most energy-intensive parts because it entails flooding and there are a lot of unnecessary communication processes. Therefore, in order to make blockchain more suitable for ELPC requirements in 6G communications and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks, we took the blockchain broadcast as an improvement candidate and designed LECast, a low-energy-consumption protocol. LECast first analyzes the energy consumption model of the communication between two drones and constructs the shortest-path broadcast tree (SPB Tree) for the UAV networks to minimize energy consumption. Meanwhile, to make the sending drone address the receiving drone in a more convenient way, we proposed an extended Huffman coding (EHC) scheme to name the drones. Furthermore, the other issues with the broadcast tree are reliability and security. When a channel fails, subsequent drones cannot smoothly receive the transaction or block data. As a result, we introduced multichannel transmission with splitting data (MTSD); that is, the transaction or block data are divided into segments and transmitted in parallel multiple times over multiple channels. Finally, through the analysis and simulation of LECast in terms of energy consumption, latency, throughput, reliability, security, and coverage rate, the advantages of LECast were confirmed, which could meet the requirements of ELPCs and be well applied to UAV networks.

State-of-the-Art and New Challenges in 5G Networks with Blockchain Technology

“…It is assumed that the UAV will exchange information with IoT systems, reducing the load on the UAV's energy resources and prolonging the UAV's service life. Using the LECast protocol reduces the amount of energy consumed; see [130].…”

Energy-Efficient Blockchain-Enabled Multi-Robot Coordination for Information Gathering: Theory and Experiments

“…Unfortunately, when applied, the blockchain's intricate workflow uses a lot of electricity (energy), defeating the purpose of many real-world applications while making it difficult to meet the demands of low-energy robotics applications. For instance, energy use in Bitcoin, a typical blockchain application, will soon exceed 7.67 GW annually, which is close to Austria's annual energy consumption (8.2 GW) [52]. Recent techniques for reducing energy consumption in blockchain include developing new blockchain-based system software [53][54][55], operating systems [56,57], hypervisors [16,58], and hardware [59,60].…”

Enhancing Blockchain Consensus With FPGA: Accelerating Implementation for Efficiency

“…Unlike traditional systems that depend on certificate authorities (CAs), blockchain significantly enhances both decentralization and security. However, these achievements come at the expense of substantial resources and energy consumption [6][7]. Figure 1 illustrates the evolution of computation and storage overhead in popular blockchain networks over the past decade, demonstrating a clear trend of exponential growth.…”

“…7 and Figure11summarize the results. This confirms that POW remains the greediest consensus in terms of FPGA resource consumption.…”