A Sharding Blockchain-based UAV System for Search and Rescue Missions
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A Sharding Blockchain-based UAV System for Search and Rescue Missions

24/03/2025 Frontiers Journals

Sharding is a promising technique to tackle the weakness of scalability in blockchain systems. However, when existing sharding strategies are adopted into UAV search and rescue (SAR) scenarios, they suffer from the following limitations. The first is adaptability, which is difficult for the blockchain, serving as the basis of the UAV network, to adjust to the changing situations and missions. The second is interoperability, which is difficult for missions that are distributed among shards to cooperate and coordinate.

To solve the problems, a research team led by Xihan Zhang published their new research on 15 Mar 2025 in Frontiers of Computer Science co-published by Higher Education Press and Springer Nature.

The team proposed a UAV system for SAR missions based on consortium blockchain with sharding. The proposed system is the first to tackle the scalability issues in blockchain UAV SAR systems by sharding, and addressing the weakness of adaptability and interoperability in sharded blockchain. To improve the adaptability, they develop the mechanism of dynamically creating shards for specific missions. The configurations and smart contracts of the shards are set by contracts based on the needs of real-time situations. To improve the interoperability, they establish Merkle proof-based cross-shard interaction for contract calls. Contracts on different shards can achieve verifiable mutual calls through the relay of the main chain.

The team evaluated the performance of the proposed system through simulation experiments. Results show that compared with non-sharding approaches, the system can efficiently handle large-scale blockchain and transactions with high computational complexity, proving that the system owns a high level of scalability due to the sharding mechanism.

Future work can focus on strengthening the combination of blockchain application and UAV infrastructures from two aspects. The first is to strengthen the connectivity of UAVs by improved algorithms, enabling them to reach consensus under weak network connections. The second is to optimize the implementation and execution of smart contracts, reducing the gas consumption of the contracts.

DOI: 10.1007/s11704-024-3467-8

https://journal.hep.com.cn/fcs/EN/10.1007/s11704-024-3467-8
Research Article, Published: 15 March 2025
Xihan ZHANG, Jiashuo ZHANG, Jianbo GAO, Libin XIA, Zhi GUAN, Hao HU, Zhong CHEN. A sharding blockchain-based UAV system for search and rescue missions. Front. Comput. Sci., 2025, 19(3): 193805，https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-024-3467-8
Attached files
  • Architecture of the proposed system
  • Schematic diagram of the UAV search and rescue operations in the propsed system
24/03/2025 Frontiers Journals
Regions: Asia, China
Keywords: Applied science, Computing

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