Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Blockchain are leading technologies used worldwide to establish safe network communication as well as build secure network infrastructures.
They provide a robust and reliable platform to address threats and face challenges such as security, privacy, flexibility, scalability, and confidentiality.
Driven by these assumptions, this paper presents an optimized energy-efficient and secure Blockchain-based software-defined IoT framework for smart networks.
Indeed, SDN and Blockchain technologies have proven to be able to suitably manage resource utilization and to develop secure network communication across the IoT ecosystem.
However, there is a lack of research works that present a comprehensive definition of such a framework that can meet the requirements of the IoT ecosystem (i.e. efficient energy utilization and reduced end-to-end delay).
Therefore, in this research, we present a layered hierarchical architecture for the deployment of a distributed yet efficient Blockchain-enabled SDN-IoT framework that ensures efficient cluster-head selection and secure network communication via
the identification and isolation of rouge switches.
Besides, the Blockchain-enabled flow-rules record keeps track of the rules enforced in the switches and maintains the consistency within the controller cluster.
Finally, we assess the performance of the proposed framework in a simulation environment and show that it can achieve optimized energy-utilization, end-to-end delay, and throughput compared to considered baselines, thus being able to achieve efficiency and security in the smart network.
Software-Defned Networking (SDN) is a prominent technology in the field of network communication that sums up a new dimension in the behavior of today’s network.
A key advantage of SDN is that it allows programmability and flexibility to the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) networks without any alteration of the architecture implementation.
However, on the other hand, it logically centralizes the network using the OpenFlow protocol. Also, as the number of IoT devices is growing speedily, the management and control of these devices need new concepts and mechanisms.
As distributed networks are gaining more attention for managing security and are more appropriate than a centralized setup for the IoT ecosystem, Blockchain constitutes one of the most advanced and established technologies to secure online communications, to the point that it is usually referred as the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT).
In addition, Blockchain provides a structure that records the digital information and distributes the data over the network but never allows for editing the information by a third party.
As a consequence, many financial and data management systems effectively take advantage of the utility of Blockchain.
Cloud computing is also widely employed given that the vast majority of the systems requires a shared database where data can be simultaneously stored and retrieved through the Internet, on demand and with high availability.
Indeed, the integration of cloud computing with IoT devices provides the latter both a greater and scalable (via the pay as- you-go paradigm) storage capability and the connectivity that is needed to share information between the devices and
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