Leveraging Hyperledger Fabric for Enhanced Compliance Monitoring in UAV Operations

The current Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) systems lack traceable, secure, private, and trustworthy automated assurance that UAV operations comply with regulatory rules and regulations. In this article, we propose a blockchain-based solution to ensure that the operations of UAVs comply with critical regulatory parameters such as geofencing and operational time restrictions. By utilizing smart contracts and blockchain’s inherent features, such as immutability, data integrity, and decentralization, our proposed system facilitates automated UAV compliance verification, ensures accountable UAV operations, and establishes a secure, private, and trustworthy framework for all stakeholders involved in UAV commercial activities. We leverage Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) to configure and implement a permissioned blockchain network capable of handling transactions amongst all stakeholders, including regulators, service providers, and UAV operators. We present our system architecture and detailed sequence diagrams for compliance assurance of UAV operations. We also discuss the configuration details of the Fabric network, the implementation of the algorithms behind the chaincode, and performance results. We conduct functional validation and evaluate the performance of our implementation in terms of both throughput and latency. The assessment shows that the solution processes over 72,000 beacons per second, making it suitable for large-scale deployment. Furthermore, we compare our proposed solution with the existing solutions to show its superiority. We make our chaincode files, which represent the smart contracts defining the set of rules and processes for a blockchain network, publicly available on GitHub.