ROBOT: Resilience Oriented Blockchain Operational Transactor for Urban Air Mobility Networks

Air travel has become increasing dense in time (e.g., air traffic management), space (e.g., system wide information management), and frequency (e.g., communications) that places increase burdens on avionics to support public safety and security. Urban Air Mobility (UAM) offers a potential to create a faster, cleaner, safer and more integrated transportation system. Current radar-based Air Traffic Service (ATS) providers lack the preservation of privacy for military and corporate operations of selected flight plans, position, and state data. We propose a Resilience Oriented Blockchain Operational Transactor (ROBOT) framework to maximize UAM capability to secure data accessing and sharing among aircrafts and Air Traffic Service (ATS) service providers, based on blockchain and microservices technologies in a hierarchical edge-fog-cloud computing paradigm. Container-based microservices are deployed to create a lightweight and decentralized ATS for decoupling the complex security functionality and providing key functions during operation planning, such as secured avionics data sharing and navigation verification, and access control. Machine learning based anomaly detection (MLAD) is developed to detect anomaly behaviors (e.g., aircraft route anomaly) across avionics mission data. A Tool-Chain testbed is developed to provide a real physical network environment including a safety application and blockchain-enabled security services for supporting real-time resilient analysis.