The future mobile communication system is expected to provide ubiquitous connectivity and unprecedented services over billions of devices. The flying drone, also known as unmanned aerial vehicle, is prominent in its flexibility and low cost, and has emerged as a significant network entity to realize such ambitious targets. However, the distributed nature makes the operation of a large-scale drone network confront many challenges, such as vulnerability to security threats and privacy leakage. To address these problems, in this article, we propose to utilize the blockchain concept to the development of drone network. Under the proposed blockchain-empowered drone networks (BeDrone), drones that are deployed for service provisioning can act as the miners of blockchain, and acquire the computing resources from each other or an edge computing node whenever needed. Recommendations and future research directions for designing BeDrone are introduced with a focus on the game theoretic incentive mechanism for resource allocation and acquisition. Performance evaluations are conducted to illustrate the benefits of the proposed architecture on developing blockchain-envisioned drones.

中文翻译：

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区块链增强的无人机网络：架构，功能和未来

预计未来的移动通信系统将为数十亿个设备提供无处不在的连接性和空前的服务。飞行无人机（也称为无人飞行器）以其灵活性和低成本着称，并已成为实现此类雄心勃勃的目标的重要网络实体。但是，分布式特性使大型无人机网络的运营面临许多挑战，例如易受安全威胁和隐私泄露的威胁。为了解决这些问题，在本文中，我们建议将区块链概念用于无人机网络的发展。在提议的具有区块链功能的无人机网络（BeDrone）下，部署用于服务供应的无人机可以充当区块链的矿工，并在需要时从彼此或边缘计算节点获取计算资源。介绍了设计BeDrone的建议和未来的研究方向，重点是用于资源分配和获取的博弈论激励机制。进行性能评估以说明拟议架构对开发区块链设想的无人机的好处。