The rapid evolution of autonomous systems—such as Unmanned Ground Units (UGUs), Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), and drone networks—has generated unprecedented demands for secure, intelligent, and efficient data processing. This study presents a comprehensive review of recent advancements integrating Quantum Machine Learning (QML) and blockchain technologies to address these challenges. Following a systematic review approach, relevant studies published between 2020 and 2024 were analyzed to evaluate their contributions to enhancing decision-making, communication reliability, and data protection in autonomous networks. The findings reveal that QML enables adaptive learning and optimization in dynamic environments, while blockchain ensures data immutability, decentralized trust, and robust security. Together, these technologies offer a promising foundation for next-generation autonomous systems characterized by transparency, resilience, and computational efficiency. The paper concludes by outlining open research issues, including scalability, interoperability, and quantum resource constraints, and highlights future research opportunities for developing unified QML–blockchain frameworks in autonomous networks.
The rapid evolution of autonomous systems—such as Unmanned Ground Units (UGUs), Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), and drone networks—has generated unprecedented demands for secure, intelligent, and efficient data processing. This study presents a comprehensive review of recent advancements integrating Quantum Machine Learning (QML) and blockchain technologies to address these challenges. Following a systematic review approach, relevant studies published between 2020 and 2024 were analyzed to evaluate their contributions to enhancing decision-making, communication reliability, and data protection in autonomous networks. The findings reveal that QML enables adaptive learning and optimization in dynamic environments, while blockchain ensures data immutability, decentralized trust, and robust security. Together, these technologies offer a promising foundation for next-generation autonomous systems characterized by transparency, resilience, and computational efficiency. The paper concludes by outlining open research issues, including scalability, interoperability, and quantum resource constraints, and highlights future research opportunities for developing unified QML–blockchain frameworks in autonomous networks.
The rapid evolution of digital technologies has intensified the need for secure, transparent, and efficient digital ecosystems. Blockchain technology, known for its decentralized and tamper-resistant nature, has emerged as a promising solution for ensuring data integrity and trust. Simultaneously, Quantum Machine Learning (QML) is gaining attention for its potential to revolutionize computational capabilities by leveraging quantum computing principles. This paper explores the integration of blockchain and QML to design secure digital ecosystems capable of handling complex data processing and ensuring robust security. Blockchain provides a distributed ledger for secure data storage and transaction validation, while QML enhances analytical capabilities through advanced pattern recognition and optimization techniques. The proposed framework addresses key challenges such as data privacy, scalability, and computational efficiency. Additionally, the study examines the role of smart contracts in automating processes and ensuring compliance within decentralized environments. Security concerns, including quantum threats to classical cryptographic systems, are also discussed, along with potential solutions such as quantum-resistant cryptography. The findings indicate that the integration of blockchain and QML can significantly enhance the security, efficiency, and scalability of digital ecosystems, making them suitable for applications in finance, healthcare, and enterprise systems.
The emergence of 6G networks precipitates unprecedented challenges in securing multi-UAV spectrum sharing due to increased connectivity demands and exposure to sophisticated cyber threats. This research proposes a quantum-enabled blockchain protocol tailored for secure, decentralized spectrum management among multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in 6G environments. Leveraging quantum key distribution (QKD) integrated within a blockchain framework, the protocol ensures information-theoretic security while maintaining transparency and immutability of spectrum allocation records. The protocol incorporates consensus mechanisms optimized for low-latency UAV networks, enabling rapid transaction validation and conflict resolution. Simulation results indicate a substantial reduction in communication overhead and vulnerability to malicious spectrum hijacking, achieving over 95% detection accuracy of unauthorized access attempts. This hybrid cryptographic architecture addresses the dual challenges of scalability and security, paving the way for resilient spectrum sharing in UAV swarms under 6G paradigms.
The emergence of 5G networks has revolutionized healthcare delivery by enabling communication with ultra-low latency, massive connectivity, and quick access to IoT devices' medical data. The digitalization of healthcare has, however, introduced privacy, data security, and scalability as major challenges, and the issues have been worsened by the rapid digitalization of the healthcare industry. The current review paper is a comprehensive evaluation of the role of Quantum Machine Learning (QML) as a paradigm for data handling with privacy preserved in the healthcare ecosystems supported by 5G. It collects advancements in quantum cryptography, Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), federated learning, and blockchain technology to explore how the combining of such technologies will enhance the confidentiality, interoperability, and real-time decision-making of the data. The review arranges and compares the state-of-theart research of 2019-2025, in which the trends, architectures, and security protocols that link classical and quantum methods in healthcare analytics become visible. It also addresses the main hurdles like quantum hardware limitations, interoperability gaps, and the tuning of federated models, and it indicates potential future research paths for the development of healthcare infrastructure that is scalable, reliable, and quantum-resistant. In conclusion, this paper gives a thorough understanding of how quantum intelligence can alter the data security and privacy landscape in 5G-enabled smart healthcare systems.
The integration of quantum computing with blockchain technology has the potential to revolutionize the landscape of decentralized systems. This chapter discusses the transformative synergy between these technologies, with a focus on its implications for next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) applications within the blockchain domain. As blockchain continues to evolve as a trusted and immutable ledger, the deployment of quantum computing holds promises for enhancing security, scalability, and the capabilities of AI-driven smart contracts and consensus mechanisms. This work discusses the core principles of quantum computing and their applicability to blockchain technology. Quantum bits (qubits) can significantly enhance the cryptographic and consensus aspects of blockchain, making it more robust against traditional attacks, such as those related to public key cryptography (PKI). Furthermore, this work discusses the role of quantum-enhanced AI within the blockchain ecosystem. The integration of quantum machine learning and quantum neural networks into smart contracts and consensus algorithms opens new possibilities for improving decision-making processes, enhancing data analytics, and enabling predictive AI models on the blockchain.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), as key enablers of 6G-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems, facilitate dynamic aerial coverage, seamless edge intelligence, and adaptive routing. However, despite these advantages, the reliability and trustworthiness of UAV swarms in 6G remain critical concerns due to rising quantum threats and limitations of traditional machine learning approaches. The paper presents QuaRTA-6G, a Quantum-Resilient, Trust-aware, and Accountable framework that provides a unified solution for 6G UAV swarms. QuaRTA-6G achieves security, trust, and efficiency by seamlessly combining post-quantum cryptography for secure communication, a decentralized ledger for identity and trust management, and Variational Quantum Federated Learning (VQFL) for efficient swarm intelligence. For quantum-resistant authentication and immutable UAV identity verification, QuaRTA-6G leverages CRYSTALS-Kyber with blockchain. Through simulations, QuaRTA-6G achieves secure authentication handshakes in under 2 ms and scales robustly to swarms of more than 100 UAVs, keeping high integrity even under 20% packet loss. Experiments demonstrate that, even under strong data poisoning attacks, the framework achieves 92% accuracy and 85% mission success rate, while comprehensive resource analysis confirms its feasibility across both standard and resource-constrained UAV platforms. Furthermore, an ablation study demonstrates that each module of QuaRTA-6G is essential for ensuring a responsible and trustworthy 6G UAV framework.
The increasing demands for ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC), high-capacity, connectivity, and mobility in next-generation wireless networks have driven the integration of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as flexible and adaptive communication nodes. UAV-assisted networks offer enhanced coverage, dynamic deployment, and cost-effective infrastructure for the sixth generation (6G) and beyond. However, optimizing UAV trajectory planning, resource allocation, and interference management is particularly challenging, especially in dynamic and large-scale environments. Classical reinforcement learning (RL) techniques, while effective in adaptive optimization, suffer from computational inefficiencies and slow convergence in high-dimensional state-action spaces. To address these constraints, quantum reinforcement learning (QRL) emerges as a novel paradigm that leverages quantum computing principles, such as superposition and entanglement, to enhance decision-making efficiency. This study provides a comprehensive overview of QRL algorithms and investigates their transformative potential in UAV-assisted wireless communication networks. We analyze UAV deployment strategies, network architectures, and topologies, highlighting their advantages as well as inherent challenges. Furthermore, we examine the limitations of classical RL algorithms and assess how QRL overcomes them while improving computational efficiency and exploration capabilities. In addition, we present a detailed review of existing QRL algorithms applicable to next-generation UAV-enhanced wireless networks, identifying key challenges that must be addressed for practical deployment. Finally, we identify open research challenges and offer future directions for integrating QRL into UAV-assisted communication, paving the way for scalable, intelligent, and high-performance wireless systems.