  UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) is rapidly gaining traction in various human
activities and has become an integral component of the satellite-air-ground-sea
(SAGS) integrated network. As high-speed moving objects, UAVs not only have
extremely strict requirements for communication delay, but also cannot be
maliciously controlled as a weapon by the attacker. Therefore, an efficient and
secure communication method designed for UAV networks is necessary. We propose
a communication mechanism ESCM. For high efficiency, ESCM provides a routing
protocol based on the artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm to accelerate
communications between UAVs. Meanwhile, we use blockchain to guarantee the
security of UAV networks. However, blockchain has unstable links in
high-mobility networks resulting in low consensus efficiency and high
communication overhead. Consequently, ESCM introduces digital twin (DT), which
transforms the UAV network into a static network by mapping UAVs from the
physical world into Cyberspace. This virtual UAV network is called CyberUAV.
Then, in CyberUAV, we design a blockchain consensus based on network coding,
named Proof of Network Coding (PoNC). Analysis and simulation show that the
above modules in ESCM have advantages over existing schemes. Through ablation
studies, we demonstrate that these modules are indispensable for efficient and
secure communication of UAV networks.
