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In this paper, we study the problem of flow-table partitioning in distributed multi-tenant software-defined networks (SDNs) in the presence of Internet-of-things (IoT) devices. In the existing literature, researchers focused on the efficient utilization of the ternary content-addressable memory (TCAM) in data traffic management by introducing the soft flow-table partitioning in the presence of a centralized controller. However, in the presence of distributed multi-tenant controllers, the soft flow-table partitioning may introduce a monopoly among the controllers. Hence, there is a need to design a flow-table partitioning scheme for distributed multi-tenant SDN, while maximizing the network sustainability and throughput. In this work, we propose a utility game-based scheme, named BIND, for dynamic flow-table partitioning. To ensure cooperation among the controllers and to avoid monopoly, we introduce to maintain a blockchain among the multi-tenant controllers. Additionally, using BIND, we ensure that each controller gets a fair chance for flow-rule replacement. Moreover, the network sustainability is ensured in BIND, while minimizing the flow-rule replacement in the flow-tables and multi-tenant SDN. Through simulation, we observe that using BIND, fairness in flow-rule placement is ensured. Additionally, the network overhead is reduced significantly.

With the increase of IOT devices worldwide, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has emerged as a critical tool to optimize and manage congested IP networks. The challenges faced with such networks are achieving optimal resource allocation and traceability. Network operators face network security attacks (eg. MITM) causing a breach in Service-Level Agreements (SLA). Traditional solutions have aimed to improve this using algorithms and additional hardware. This paper presents DecOp, a new methodology in operating a network based on peers instead of a centralized algorithm using Blockchain (BC). BC is a growing technology that is used primarily in the financial industry (eg. BITCON and ETHEREUM) because of its ability to bring dependable consensus amongst several users using distributed ledgers. DecOp makes use of the existing platforms infrastructure to process and store network configurations. This allows for a modular solution that can be implemented and verified with varying platforms. We design a new method to allocate resources by integrating SDN and BC using the designed Secure Service Contract (SSC) chaincode, Secure Network Operator (SNO) chaincode, and modular communication middleware. This provides a dependable traceability by storing changes to the network state in an immutable ledger. A prototype is developed and tested with Hyperledger Fabric, as the BC platform, and OpenDaylight, as the SDN Controller. Evaluation results focus on system performance verses the BC Network size, from 12 to 40 peers.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) focuses on the isolation of control plane and data plane, greatly enhancing the network's support for heterogeneity and flexibility. However, although the programmable network greatly improves the performance of all aspects of the network, flexible load balancing across controllers still challenges the current SDN architecture. Complex application scenarios lead to flexible and changeable communication requirements, making it difficult to guarantee the Quality of Service (QoS) for SDN users. To address this issue, this paper proposes a paradigm that uses blockchain to incentive safe load balancing for multiple controllers. We proposed a controller consortium blockchain for secure and efficient load balancing of multi-controllers, including a novel consensus mechanism Proof-of-Balance (PoB) and a corresponding cryptographic currency balance coin. In addition, we have designed a novel game theory-based incentive mechanism to stimulate controllers with tight communication resources to offload tasks to idle controllers. The security analysis and performance simulation results indicate the superiority and effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) becomes a de facto standard for the future Internet. SDN decouples the control plane from the data plane of a proprietary network asset to ensure better programmability and security for designing more innovative future network applications. Presently, the SDN framework does not have proper access control mechanism among different entities, namely SDN applications, SDN controllers and switches. To achieve this goal, this paper proposes a blockchain-based access control scheme for the SDN framework. The proposed scheme has the capability to resist various well-known attacks and alleviate the existing single point of controller failure issue in SDN.

Software-Defined Network (SDN) is vital in simplifying the dynamic network characteristics and device management. However, the centralized architecture of SDN opens the scope for malicious attacks on the controllers. To mitigate such attacks in real-time, we propose an SDN architecture for resource-constrained devices in a fog-enabled IoT environment using a private blockchain (pBC) network. We exploit the decentralized nature of pBC for enabling resource-constrained SDN controllers towards transparently setting flow rules for fog nodes and other devices in the network. In case the miners identify faulty flow rules, pBC allows the SDN devices/fog nodes to retract back to an earlier flow rule, while raising a flag against the alleged controller. Additionally, since data in pBC are accessible by all the candidates having the genesis file, they are readily available to malicious users. Towards this, we further propose encrypting the data before inserting them into the blocks, which helps in securing the data from undesired users. Through the extensive deployment of our proposed fusion, we observe CPU usage of 30% among the devices and latencies in the range of milliseconds, which presents the feasibility of our system with minimum delay. We also observe a reduction in energy consumption by more than 90%, compared to traditional SDN.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a promising platform to secure and manage large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) due to its separated control and data plane functionality as well as programmability in the network. The original design of SDN faces single point of failure, and therefore several decentralized SDN architectures for IoT were proposed. However, practical SDN may be deployed by various networking operators, which incurs the conflict between data security of different networking operators and cooperative network management among them. Existing schemes cannot well support the cooperative network management among multiple controllers and meanwhile guarantee data security. To tackle this problem, we propose a blockchain based SDN framework for IoT called BS-IoT. BS-IoT introduces blockchain into SDN to support secure and cooperative network management. Besides, we leverage blockchain sharding for better efficiency and improve it with secure multi-party computation (SMPC) to make it suitable for decentralized SDN management with data security. The security analysis illustrate the security and effectiveness of our scheme.

The restricted resources in IoT networks such as limited battery have resulted in strict requirements to prolong the network life time.To improve the communication, IoT nodes attempt to optimize the available energy in the sensor network, this makes them vulnerable to the malicious attacks from adversaries because of open scenario. In addition, enhancing the security level will consume the energy and decreases network life time. In order to balance energy and security in the network game theory concept is used. We design a non cooperative game between energy and security where the utilities of both energy and security players are maximized by controlling the number of nodes transmitting and hash length. We consider complete and incomplete information game and determine Nash equilibrium. Extensive simulation have been performed to examine Nash equilibrium. We obtained Nash equilibrium for both energy and security players.

In today's technological climate, users require fast automation and digitization results for large amounts of data at record speeds. Especially in the field of medicine, where each patient may be asked to perform different examinations, and each of them can help in the diagnosis or prediction of further disease progression. Furthermore, all produced data from these examinations must be stored somewhere and available to various doctors for analysis who may be in geographically diverse locations. To make this possible, such data should be stored in databases accessible to many doctors, which makes them prone to malicious entities, especially if access to data should be made available to algorithms for further analysis/diagnosis. In this paper, we propose a model for storing medical data that could easily be associated with individual patients using blockchain technology and a proposition to train intelligent systems using this data for the use of all patients.

Software-defined networks offer lower latency service and massive intelligent devices connectivity for the Internet of Things(IoT). As one of the pivotal applications in the IoT, smart community provides smart services for residents through the SDN technique. However, the centralized SDN suffers from single point of attacks such as DDoS from IoT devices and the issue of data leakage. In this paper, we use blockchain and proxy re-encryption(PRE) technologies to tackle these challenges. The blockchain authorizes all devices in the network to improve their credibility and authenticity. What's more, a blockchain-based data sharing framework that combines a PRE scheme is introduced for secure device-to-device communication in smart communities. A series of smart contracts are designed for flexible operations of searching and updating records on the blockchain. The experiments reveal that our design is highly efficient and has high performance.

This talk does not have an abstract.

Intelligent Vehicular Network (IVN) is a communication environment, where Intelligent vehicles communicate and share the information within the network. In an IVN, all vehicles are connected to the internet and vehicles ease to communicate information with other vehicles. IVN aims to improve safety and efficiency by sharing data with only nearby vehicles. The greatest challenge in IVN has trusted data circulation with reliable intelligent vehicles without affecting any personal information of Intelligent vehicles. In this article, we endeavor to resolve the above-mentioned issue by proposing an effective tri-Blockchain based communication network. We have introduced three blockchain servers, namely Public, Special and Supreme Blockchain server. The public blockchain server and special blockchain server show dynamic features whereas supreme blockchain server features are static for all the time. Our Tri-Blockchain servers provide a greater extent of reliable and quick response during an emergency scenario. We have verified our proposal with an accidental USECASE scenario.

The rapid advancements in autonomous technologies have paved way for vehicular networks. In particular, Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) forms the basis of the future of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). ITS represents the communication among vehicles by acquiring and sharing the data. Though congestion control is enhanced by Internet of Vehicles (IoV), there are various security criteria where entire communication can lead to many security and privacy challenges. A blockchain can be deployed to provide the IoV devices with the necessary authentication and security feature for the transfer of data. Blockchain based IoV mechanism eliminates the single source of failure and remains secure at base despite having strong security, the higher level layers and applications are susceptible to attacks. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to overcome several vulnerabilities of current blockchain technology. In this paper, we propose an AI-Powered Blockchain which provides auto coding feature for the smart contracts making it an intelligent contract. Moreover, it speeds up the transaction verification and optimises energy consumption. The results show that intelligent contracts provide higher security compared to smart contracts considering range of different scenarios.

Over the past few years, with increasing mobile traffic and decreasing revenue per user, Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets) have become a topic of interest to many stakeholders. HetNets is a combination of networks with different access technologies and cell types working with each other. Mobile network operators are keen to reduce operational expenses by deploying HetNets while they provide better QoS to the user anywhere, anytime wireless connectivity. Although HetNets provide various benefits, yet many open issues need to be addressed to harness their impact. They are also prone to several security threats such as physical attacks, man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks, impersonation attacks, replay attacks, and node tampering attacks. Moreover, due to the different nature and structure of each network in a HetNet, secure handover between various wireless networks is a complex task that is not yet resolved. In this paper, we address the issues mentioned above by designing a secure handover mechanism that is resistant to both passive and active attacks. We also show a performance comparison of our protocol with the state-of-the-art protocols for securing hetnets based on computation, communication, and memory storage cost.

A smart grid (SG) system offers many services to the end-users, such as load management, load forecasting, and energy trading (ET). As data among different devices in SG environment flows through an open channel, i.e., the Internet, so, security and privacy always remain a challenging issue. Though many solutions exist for this problem in literature these solutions are not adequate to handle security, privacy, latency, real-time settlement of ET. Moreover, most of the solutions reported in the literature are based upon the centralized architecture having a single point of failure. Motivated from these facts, this paper proposes a scheme ET-DeaL, which is a Smart Contract-based Secure Energy Trading scheme for SG system for peer-to-peer (P2P) ET. ET-DeaL uses Ethereum smart contract (ESC) and InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) for the P2P ET management. Moreover, it manages the energy load of residential houses, industries, and electric vehicles (EVs). In ET-DeaL, security and privacy issues have been resolved using ESC, while storage cost issues are handled with IPFS protocol. We implemented a real-time ESC and deploy it in Truffle suite. The security bugs of the DeaL are tested on MyThril open-source tool. ET-DeaL is lightweight in terms of storage and communication costs as it uses the IPFS for energy data storage and 5G-TI for communication respectively. Finally, ET-DeaL performance evaluation demonstrates its effectiveness as compared to the traditional systems where it outperforms the existing schemes with respect to various performance evaluation metrics.

Software defined networking (SDN) is the promising technology for the future network with the advantage of isolating control plane form the data plane. Through SDN, physical network resources can be softwarized and virtualized easily. In future network scenarios, end users usually have customized resource demands, modeled as virtual network requests (VNRs). Hence, these VNRs need to be allocated and implemented efficiently, called as virtual network embedding (VNE). As one of the key issues in SDN, secure softwarized and virtualized resource allocation, especially in certain network scenarios with high security requirements, calls for significant attention in the literature. In this paper, we research the virtual network embedding for secure SDN, using the blockchain technology. VNE problem model for secure SDN is firstly presented. Then, it is the security model for SDN. Next, we propose our blockchain-based VNE algorithm for secure SDN. Aiming at validating our blockchain-based algorithm efficiency, we execute the experiment evaluation. Experiment results show that our blockchain-based algorithm performs better than its counterpart without blockchain technology, in terms of fault tolerant performance.

In this paper, we propose a Blockchain-based solution for the recovery of an SDN controller back to a previously known state upon sudden failure. A lightweight minimal Blockchain ledger containing metadata details about each controller event is maintained by the switches. The set of all instructions given by the controller to the switches denotes the state of the controller at that instant. Whenever a new event occurs, the meta-information about it gets stored in the Blockchain which is updated in the switches after regular epochs. Upon failure of the controller, it can download all the tables and information from the respective switches after coming back online again. It checks and compares the metadata contained in the Blockchain with those data received from the switches. In addition to the existing security services provided by Blockchain, the proposed scheme can further solve the controller failure problem. The performance of the proposed solution is measured through simulation and analysis. The proposed scheme with the metadata-based solution saves about 75% of space and a controller can securely recover with a duration of 50 Sec.

Backscatter heterogeneous networks are expected to usher a new era of massive connectivity of low-powered devices. With the integration of software-defined networking (SDN), such networks hold the promise to be a key enabling technology for massive Internet-of-things (IoT) due to myriad applications in industrial automation, healthcare, and logistics management. However, there are many aspects of SDN-based backscatter heterogeneous networks that need further development before practical realization. One of the challenging aspects is the high level of interference due to the reuse of spectral resources for backscatter communications. To partly address this issue, this article provides a reinforcement learning-based solution for effective interference management when backscatter tags coexist with other legacy devices in a heterogeneous network. Specifically, using reinforcement learning, the agents are trained to minimize the interference for macro-cell (legacy users) and small-cell (backscatter tags). Novel reward functions for both macro- and small-cells have been designed that help in controlling the transmission power levels of users. The results show that the proposed framework not only improves the performance of macro-cell users but also fulfills the quality of service requirements of backscatter tags by optimizing the long-term rewards.

Mobile-edge computing (MEC) has been recognized as a promising technique to provide wireless user equipments (UEs) with enhanced computation capability. In this paper, we consider an MEC cellular system, which consists of a number of base stations (BSs) and UEs. We suppose that each BS is equipped with an MEC server which offers computation offloading service for UEs. Considering the fairness among UEs in task execution, we formulate the computation offloading problem as a min-max worst-case design problem that minimizes the maximal task execution time among all the UEs. To solve the optimization problem, we consider both single UE case and multiple UEs case. For single UE case, we design the analytical task partition and computation offloading strategy and also solve the optimization problem via convex optimization tools. For multiple UEs case, to tackle the coupling among multiple UEs, we propose a heuristic computation offloading algorithm which designs the computation offloading strategy for UEs sequentially. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

With an increasingly close relationship between people's daily life and the Internet, the traditional network architecture puts tight upper bound on the rigid characteristics of using the existing legacy network components. Therefore, a new network architecture called a software-defined network (SDN) emerged, which provides more flexibility, especially for the IoT environment. However, the flexibility of SDN also brings various security risks. For example, (i) SDN has a relatively low fault tolerance mechanism. If communication with the controller fails, then the forwarding layer device may not be able to obtain the routing information; (ii) more complex applications have lower reliability, and new applications may have hidden unknown vulnerabilities; (iii) the open programmable interface is also in danger of being illegally intruded. To address these problems, this paper proposes a blockchain-based SDN monitoring system that uses the information invariance of the blockchain and a distributed consensus mechanism to enhance the security of SDN. It also uses the distributed storage feature of P2P network data to enhance the disaster resistance of SDN. In addition, in order to prevent stakeholders and non-professionals from interfering with the validity of the test results, we use multicasting instead of broadcasting in traditional blockchain applications for information transmission. While making full use of the flexibility of SDN control traffic and deployment protocols, it can effectively improve the overall security and rigor of the system. Encouragingly, the simulation results show that the scheme can effectively control the traffic and balance the load at the same time. Furthermore, we also outlined some challenges and future research directions.