DRUBER: A trustable decentralized drone-based delivery system

Abstract

In the latest years, there has been a growing interest in autonomous drone delivery. This is due to the increasing demand for efficient delivery services, and to the concurrent inability of existing ground based systems to provide guaranteed availability, and delivery time. However, the cost for implementing a centralized drone-based delivery service can only be afforded by large commercial organizations. To face this issue we propose Druber, a fully distributed service based on a fleet of coordinated drones, belonging to multiple owners. With Druber, delivery of a parcel is provided by several drones, with intermediate pit stops for battery replacement or drone-to-drone parcel handovers. The use of a federated approach eliminates the need of a single company investment and guarantees a quickly deployable, highly scalable, and inexpensive architecture. Nevertheless, it introduces a problem of trust: can users rely on private drone owners To guarantee a trustable service Druber leverages blockchain features to develop and control the entire delivery chain. Our evaluation shows an impressive advantage of our platform with respect to existing ground based services in terms of service cost and parcel delivery time, at the expense of a negligible delay for the management of blockchain operations.