A FANET to Provide Blockchain On Demand at the Extreme Edge of a 6G Network

In the last few years, the blockchain technology has become one of the most hyped innovations, and it has been gaining a lot of traction as an horizontal technology to be widely developed in various fields, from academia research to industry. One of its main applications is providing a distributed database that is shared in the form of an encrypted/immutable ledger which makes the information open for everyone. However, in some cases, data to be stored could be very big (for example, high-definition images or video flows), and cannot be sent to miners running on far clouds for saving them inside blocks, but instead should be processed at the edge of the network. In the case of scenarios regarding areas without a nearby structured network, one of the most widely accepted solutions is to extend network capabilities at the edge using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The objective of this paper is to bring mining on-site by means of a Flying Ad-hoc Network (FANET), constituted by a set of UAVs communicating with each other, each hosting a Computing Element (CE) running a miner. Despite countless areas where UAVs and the blockchain can be used, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first work in which the blockchain is provided by UAVs. An extensive numerical analysis is carried out to evaluate the overall performance of the proposed framework varying some system parameters.