U-spaceChain: A Decentralized Approach to Unmanned Traffic Management Services Provision

Thousands of drone operations are expected over urban areas in different countries, as drones bring economic and societal benefits. However, it raises problems regarding unmanned traffic management, including safety, regulatory, security, automatization, communication, and scalability aspects. How can we provide decentralized services for drone traffic management that are compliant with the regulatory framework? We identified some requirements from the European U-space regulation and applied the Systems Development Methodology. We devised a permissioned blockchain-based architecture, Services as smart contracts, and a simple consensus mechanism named Appointed-by-Authority as conceptual contributions. The practical one is a working software named U-spaceChain. It is a proof-of-concept of a blockchain in which smart contracts provide Flight Authorization, Network Identification, Traffic Information, Conformance Monitoring, Geo Awareness, Weather Information, and Common Information services. It is compliant with regulations, secure by design, can support the development of new services, and the concepts can be reused in other domains. We also designed enablers that allow testing this proof-of-concept by creation and then simulation of drone traffic. U-spaceChain may be a reference for the research and application of blockchain to the drone traffic management domain.