A Blockchain-Based Trust Framework for Resilient Cross-Domain UAV Service Orchestration

2026-02-27

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenges of cross-domain unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) service orchestration, which suffers from weak identity management, insufficient authentication security, and poor resilience under node failures, thereby hindering low-latency and highly trustworthy collaboration. To overcome these limitations, this work proposes a novel trust architecture that integrates consortium blockchain with Service Function Chaining (SFC), enabling for the first time decentralized identity (DID)-based cross-domain authentication, dynamic service-aware orchestrator selection, and end-to-end auditability. A four-phase hierarchical cross-domain authentication protocol is designed to significantly reduce authentication latency and enhance system throughput. The proposed approach demonstrates superior performance over existing centralized or static solutions in terms of security, resilience, and efficiency.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Mobility, Driving & Flight
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web applications in cross-disciplinary domains and verticals such as mixed reality, smart cities, and digital health
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Vertical and domain-specific search
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks are increasingly deployed for complex missions, including disaster response, intelligent logistics, and environmental monitoring. These missions generally require coordinated collaboration among multiple UAVs across distinct administrative domains. To support such cross-domain cooperation, service function chains (SFCs) are constructed, where complex workflows are decomposed into ordered service functions assigned to appropriate UAVs along the mission path. However, it is challenging to ensure secure, trustworthy, and low-latency cross-domain SFC orchestration in identity management, authentication, and resilience to node failures. To address these issues, this paper proposes a consortium blockchain-based trust architecture for cross-domain decentralized identity verification, auditable task execution, and dynamic service-aware orchestrator selection. The framework employs a hierarchical four-phase cross-domain authentication protocol covering the credential pre-verification, intra-domain execution, secure relay, and audit logging. The use case analysis confirms that the proposed framework achieves substantial reductions in authentication latency and significant improvements in system throughput against centralized and static schemes. The open challenges in scalability, adaptive trust assessment, interoperability, and energy efficiency are discussed, thereby providing directions for future researches on secure and efficient cross-domain UAV service orchestration.

Problem

• cross-domain UAV
• service function chain
• trust
• authentication
• resilience

Innovation

• blockchain
• cross-domain orchestration
• service function chaining
• decentralized identity
• UAV networks