LAP-BFT: Lightweight Asynchronous Provable Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Consensus Mechanism for UAV Network Trusted Systems

Abstract

An UAV network performing missions in complex environments is an Ad hoc network of a set of lightweight nodes that is not only exposed to external physical interference and network attacks, but also to the problem of dynamically generated error nodes within the network. The UAV network is essentially an asynchronous Byzantine distributed system. Completing the mission relies on the trustworthiness of the participating UAVs. The timely identification and isolation of errant nodes is necessary to ensure the overall performance of the UAV network during the mission. Assessing the latest status of UAVs and reaching consensus across the network is the key to solving the trust problem. It is a major challenge to break through the limitation of insufficient resources of UAV networks to achieve efficient consensus and accurate evaluation of UAV trusted status. The approach proposed in this paper is lightweight and asynchronous provable Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus algorithm that achieves global trusted state evaluation by obtaining an asynchronous generic subset by consensus on the local status data of nodes. It effectively reduces the communication and computational overhead. Through QualNet UAV network simulation experiments, comparing existing asynchronous consensus algorithms with better practicality, the recommended lightweight asynchronous provable consensus algorithm has better performance in terms of consensus latency and energy consumption rate.