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.

Introduction

Currently, with the increasing number of electronic devices, lots of them are expected to be linked to the Internet and constitute the Internet of Things (IoT) [1]. As an important part of IoT, machine-to-machine (M2M) communications emerge as a promising communication paradigm, in which machine-type communication devices (MTCDs) can communicate with each other intelligently with no or very limited human interventions, such as wearable devices, automotive electronics, smart grids, industry automation, and so on [2], [3]. According to many predictions or reports by research institutions and companies, M2M connections will reach 14.6 billion by 2022 and around 50 billion in the near future [4], [5]. There is no doubt that the number of M2M connections will surpass human-to-human (H2H) communications [5].