Blockchain-enabled Charging Scheduling for Unmanned Vehicles in Smart Cities

Abstract

Recently, mobile crowd sensing (MCS) has been widely used in smart cities with the help of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and autonomous cars. To ensure long-term, long-distance sensing tasks of UAVs, mobile unmanned charging stations, called “ Carriers ”, are scheduled to reach preset charging locations in a city to provide charging services. However, existing methods not only have difficulty in serving a large number of UAVs, but also face a big challenge of potential security vulnerabilities in the charging transactions. To address the above issues, this paper explores the blockchain technology to design an auction-based framework for scheduling charging services for UAVs while improving the security of charging transactions. In particular, considering the revenues of Carriers and the utilities of UAVs, we develop a new auction mechanism based on the emerging deep reinforcement learning technique to improve the auction performance. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can enhance charging transactions’ security and optimize the system performance.