Work-in-Progress: Merkle Tree-Based Secure Routing for Digital Twin-Assisted Aircraft Network in 6G Wireless

Providing Internet access above-the-clouds has made the development of aircraft networks more important than ever. However, new and emerging Internet applications have increased the challenge of providing seamless and real-time connectivity with traditional routing algorithms for aircraft networks in the upcoming 6G due to the highly-dynamic and unstable topology. Moreover, traditional routing mechanisms are prone to routing attacks, which can increase the packet transfer delay. To this end, in this paper, we present Merkle Tree-based secure routing mechanism with the assistance of digital twin. First, we construct a blockchain-based system with decentralized and distributed characteristics for the clustering of aircraft. Then, we propose a novel Merkle-Tree-based secure routing algorithm by combining real-time and historical data with digital twins. A Merkle tree is a data structure that contains gathered data from sender and receiver aircraft. Merkle root in an aircraft cluster forwards the gathered data to a satellite or a ground station in a secure manner. Accordingly, Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA)-256 is used for data integrity and a tree-based structure is built to reduce the number of transactions so that it is aimed to prevent malicious aircraft attacks. Finally, we show through a simulation environment, how blockchain processing time and the number of transactions can be reduced by meeting the strict Quality of Service (QoS) requirements for aircraft networks in 6G. Furthermore, we also use Proof of Stake (PoS) to reduce the computational time for mining a block as well as reducing the packet delivery ratio and packet transfer delay.