On Safety of Decentralized Unmanned Aircraft System Traffic Management Using Blockchain
Asma Hamissi, Amine Dhraief, Layth Sliman · 2023
The increasing use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), especially in the civil sector, has brought to the fore-front the challenge of managing and integrating them within national airspace alongside manned aircraft. Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM) is a specialized system designed to oversee unmanned aircraft operations. A UTM system provides an array of services and can adopt either a centralized or decentralized architecture. The decentralized architecture serves as a possible solution to the single point of failure problem; however, it may introduce security issues in the areas of identification, flight plan management and communication links. These issues invariably erode the performance and efficiency of the UTM. Renowned for its robust security capabilities, blockchain technology presents an effective means to enhance the security framework of a UTM. In this article, we delineate the security challenges that could impact a UTM, and we explore the avenues through which blockchain technology has been leveraged to address these challenges.