UAV-Assisted Data Transmission in Blockchain-Enabled M2M Communications with Mobile Edge Computing

Recently, the development of the internet of Things (ioT) provides plenty of opportunities and challenges in various fields. As an essential part of ioT, machine-to-machine (M2M) communications open a novel way that machine-type communication devices (MTCDs) are connected and communicated without any human intervention. However, when ioT infrastructures are destroyed, network services will be disrupted. Then it is difficult for the MTCDs located in remote areas to restore communication by themselves immediately. To cope with these problems, in this article, we introduce some promising technologies such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), blockchain and mobile edge computing (MEC) to ensure data transmission, security and reliability in damaged M2M communications networks. Meanwhile, we propose a joint optimization framework to maximize both data computation capacity and throughput of blockchain systems, and formulate it as a Markov decision process (MDP). in order to solve the dynamic and complicated optimization problem, dueling deep Q-network (DQN) is adopted, so that the optimal selection and decision can be made to achieve maximum system rewards. Simulation results with different system parameters show that our proposed framework can improve the system performance effectively compared to the existing schemes. Finally, open research issues and challenges are discussed for UAV-assisted M2M communications.