Trustworthy Cooperative UAV-Based Data Management in Densely Crowded Environments

Crowded environments such as massive events are challenging for network infrastructure, as they involve many simultaneous offloading requests, heavy network traffic, and QoS-related issues. Designing smart solutions near the end users allows them to handle some of these requests, meet their QoS requirements, and reduce the load on the network infrastructure, which improves resource management. This article proposes a data management solution using multiple cooperative drones that fly close to the end users and provide advanced features as edge devices to store, handle, or forward data. A cloud server monitoring the area will predict users' behavior with the long short-term memory deep-learning-based model, and send a replication of the most requested data to the drones. Due to the limited storage capacity of drones, the replicated data is distributed between them based on location and computation load. In such systems that are managed by one entity, trust between the various components is highly important. Thus, all communications between the drones and the crowds are executed using smart contracts. The article highlights the benefits of the proposed model, as well as the emerging issues and challenges. © 2017 IEEE.