Smart Agriculture with Quantum Intelligence and Blockchain Security

Abstract

Selecting energy-efficient, trustworthy cluster heads (CHs) remains a key bottleneck in agricultural wireless sensor and Internet of Things (IoT) networks, where heuristic protocols such as LEACH often converge to unstable configurations and cannot verify whether a selected node is trustworthy. This paper proposes a framework that combines a Quantum-Inspired Genetic Algorithm (QIGA) for cluster head selection with a permissioned blockchain trust-verification layer. Unlike prior work that applies quantum classifiers to sensor-data classification, the proposed method encodes candidate cluster head assignments as qubit chromosomes and evolves them through quantum rotation-gate updates, treating cluster formation as a combinatorial optimization problem rather than a classification task. Verified assignments and node reputation scores are recorded as immutable blockchain transactions validated through a lightweight Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus, enabling automatic exclusion of low-trust nodes without a central authority. A discrete-event simulation comparing the proposed framework against LEACH and a classical genetic algorithm baseline shows comparable or improved energy retention and reliable detection of malicious nodes across a range of attack ratios. The results indicate that combining quantum-inspired combinatorial optimization with blockchain-verified trust offers a practical, hardware-independent pathway toward energy-aware, tamperresistant clustering for precision agriculture