Blockchain-Secured Data Collection for UAV-Assisted IoT: A DDPG Approach

Internet of Things (IoT) can be conveniently deployed while empowering various applications, where the IoT nodes can form clusters to finish certain missions collectively. In this paper, we propose to employ unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to assist the IoT data collection with blockchain-based security provisioning, towards efficient and safeguarded IoT operations. In particular, a blockchain with proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism is constructed among the UAVs with the collected IoT data. Correspondingly, we optimize the IoT communication and the UAV deployment for the maximum blockchain throughput considering the PoS procedure. The problem is solved with a deep deterministic policy gradient-based approach, where the power allocation is obtained with closed-form solutions and the UAV deployment is learned with actor-critic networks. Simulation results are provided to show the deployment and performance, corroborating the effectiveness of our proposal.