A Review on Blockchain for Medical Delivery Drones in 5G-IoT Era: Progress and Challenges

Medical delivery drones are gradually becoming an inseparable part of smart human society, especially with the emergence of 5G and existing internet of things (IoT). A wide range of medical facilities can be leveraged via drone-based delivery aspects. Being a nascent stage of development, this field of application faces significant drawbacks from reliable and secure e-healthcare. In this paper, we discuss the importance of blockchain to improve decentralization, privacy, and consensus-aware medical product delivery by the drones. We firstly review the background of blockchain, 5G-IoT ecosystem and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Secondly, we review existing UAVs capable of performing medial delivery. We also find whether such drones are technically viable to work accordance to the 5GIoT era. Thirdly, we propose a modified multi-modal aspect behind medical delivery drones under the 5G-IoT assisted blockchain ecosystem. Fourthly, we propose an architecture comprising 5G, IoT, blockchain, and medical delivery drones with extraterrestrial communication support from satellites. Lastly, we discuss key open research challenges and provide a future road map.

I. Introduction

With the emergence of the 5G-IoT era, the existing healthcare domain is demanding more reliable, effective, low-cost and secure notions to cater remote and emergency e-health services [1]. Drones are gradually being deployed in a multitude of industrial applications starting from precision agriculture, disaster management, traffic monitoring and military applications.