A dynamic lightweight blockchain sharding protocol for autonomous collaborative combat of UAV swarms in denied environments

In recent years, major military powers have been advancing the "Anti-Access/Area Denial" (A2/AD) defense strategy. unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms operating in denied environments require robust information security measures, and blockchain technology offers a potential solution for enhancing their security. However, traditional UAV blockchain systems in denied environments face significant challenges, including excessive resource consumption, unbalanced workloads, inefficient consensus mechanisms, and insufficient security. To tackle these challenges, we propose the Collaborative Operations UAV Blockchain Sharding Protocol (COUAVChain). First, we design a hierarchical sharding blockchain architecture and a hybrid lightweight/global node storage scheme, significantly reducing communication and storage overhead in heterogeneous UAV swarms. Second, we propose a dynamic reputation mechanism to assess node trustworthiness and introduce the Resource-Reputation Constrained Label Propagation Algorithm (R2CLPA), which optimizes resource-aware load balancing and prevents Byzantine node clustering while minimizing cross-shard transactions. Finally, we introduce the Reputation-Bayesian HotStuff (RB-HotStuff) consensus algorithm, which leverages a dynamic reputation mechanism and Bayesian inference to establish a weighted voting model. This approach enhances consensus reliability and efficiency while improving shard scalability by reducing intra-shard communication overhead. Experimental evaluations and comparative analysis demonstrate that the proposed protocol outperforms the baseline schemes in terms of system throughput, consensus latency, workload balancing, resource consumption, scalability, and security. It effectively enhances the collaborative operations of UAV swarms in denied environments.