Mobile edge computing (MEC) sinks computing power to the edge of networks and integrates mobile access networks and Internet services in 5G and beyond. With the continuous development of services, privacy protection is extremely important in a heterogeneous MEC system for multiserver collaboration. However, most of the existing schemes only consider the privacy of users or services other than the privacy of network topology. For the purpose of topology privacy protection, this article employs blockchain to construct heterogeneous MEC systems and adopts accommodative bloom filter as a carrier for multidomain collaborative routing consensus without exposing topology privacy. Blockchain is used to implement multiplex mutual trust networking and collaborative routing verification through the membership service and consensus mechanism. Experiments are conducted to evaluate the feasibility and performances of our scheme. The results indicate that the proposed scheme can highly improve the credibility and efficiency of MEC collaboration.
Asuquo A. Okon, Ibrahim Elgendi, Olusegun Samuel Sholiyi, Jaafar M. H. Elmirghani · 6 authors
Whereas 4G LTE networks have brought about an increase in data rates of mobile networks, they are unable to meet the capacity demands of future networks. Specifically, the centralized nature of the evolved packet core (EPC) makes the network non-scalable to match the exponential increase in number of wireless devices in addition to the complexities of diverse service requirements. The SDN concept has recently attracted a lot of research interest as a viable proposition for bringing about programmability and ease of network management while also offering flexibility for innovative network designs. However, current SDN implementations are not adapted to support business agreements that foster interoperability among mobile network operators (MNOs). This paper is an extended version of our earlier work and we intend to present a unified SDN and blockchain architecture with enhanced spectrum management features for enabling seamless user roaming capabilities between MNOs. Our simulation results show that users can experience no disruption in service with very minimal delay as they traverse between operators.
Abstract Network providers either attempt to handle massive distributed denial-of-service attacks themselves or redirect traffic to third-party scrubbing centers. If providers adopt the first option, it is sensible to counter such attacks in their infancy via provider collaborations deploying distributed security mechanisms across multiple domains in an attack path. This motivated our work presented in this paper. Specifically, we investigate the establishment of trusted federations among adjacent and disjoint network domains, that is, autonomous systems (ASes) that collectively mitigate malicious traffic. Our approach is based on Distributed Ledger Technologies for signaling, coordination, and orchestration of a collaborative mitigation schema via appropriate blockchain-based smart contracts. Reputation scores are used to rank ASes based on their mitigation track record. The allocation of defense resources across multiple collaborators is modeled as a combinatorial optimization problem considering reputation scores and network flow weights. Malicious flows are mitigated using programmable network data paths within the eXpress Data Path (XDP) framework; this enables operators with enhanced packet processing throughput and advanced filtering flexibility. Our schema was implemented in a proof-of-concept prototype and tested under realistic network conditions.
Condominium network refers to intra-organization networks, where smart buildings or apartments are connected and share resources over the network. Secured communication platform or channel has been highlighted as a key requirement for a reliable condominium which can be ensured by the utilization of the advanced techniques and platforms like Software-Defined Network (SDN), Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Blockchain (BC). These technologies provide a robust, and secured platform to meet all kinds of challenges, such as safety, confidentiality, flexibility, efficiency, and availability. This work suggests a distributed, scalable IoT-SDN with Blockchain-based NFV framework for a smart condominium (DistB-Condo) that can act as an efficient secured platform for a small community. Moreover, the Blockchain-based IoT-SDN with NFV framework provides the combined benefits of leading technologies. It also presents an optimized Cluster Head Selection (CHS) algorithm for selecting a Cluster Head (CH) among the clusters that efficiently saves energy. Besides, a decentralized and secured Blockchain approach has been introduced that allows more prominent security and privacy to the desired condominium network. Our proposed approach has also the ability to detect attacks in an IoT environment. Eventually, this article evaluates the performance of the proposed architecture using different parameters (e.g., throughput, packet arrival rate, and response time). The proposed approach outperforms the existing OF-Based SDN. DistB-Condo has better throughput on average, and the bandwidth (Mbps) much higher than the OF-Based SDN approach in the presence of attacks. Also, the proposed model has an average response time of 5% less than the core model.
With the exponential increase in the complexity of network management and configuration, Software Defined Networking (SDN) has emerged as a promising network paradigm. SDN aims to efficiently transform network architecture and operations to be agile, and effectively enrich the functionality of underlying network elements, such as routers and switches, by decoupling the control plane from the data plane. In SDN, the network intelligence is centralized in a software entity so-called SDN controller, which enables network administrators to dynamically manage, secure, and optimize network resources and programmatically shape all entire network traffic pattern. Despite the impressive benefits SDN has brought to network architecture, it introduces new security challenges and prompts different implementation strategies to spread attack vectors. This paper comprehensively describes the utilization of Blockchain technology to secure and protect SDN architecture and discusses the feasibility of integrating the revolutionary technologies of SDN and Blockchain to provide confidentiality, integrity, and availability to network infrastructure.
A. S. M. Sanwar Hosen, Saurabh Singh, Pradip Kumar Sharma, Uttam Ghosh · 7 authors
Blockchain is attracting more and more attention to its applicability in the fields of Internet of Things (IoT). In particular, it is able to store data in unalterable blocks, associated with its secure peer-to-peer in a growing problem of transaction authorization in industrial and service provisioning applications. Moreover, it facilitates decentralized transaction (TX) validation and distributed ledger. The underneath algorithm of TX selection for validation may not be effective in terms of delay of various services of the applications. Because the existing random-based or fee-based selections are a delay insensitive that does not guarantee a minimum delay of a time-critical TX. This paper proposes a blockchain-based transaction validation protocol for a secure distributed IoT network. It includes a context-aware TX validation technique, where a TX is validated by a miner with the priority of a service. Besides, we adopt the Software Defined Networking enabled gateway as a middleware between IoT and the blockchain network in which the control operations and security of the network in a largescale are ensured. The proposed network model has evaluated and compared to the Core network. The results ensure the given priority in TX validation is more delay sensitive than the existing technique to provide quality of service of the network.
Anichur Rahman, Mostofa Kamal Nasir, Ziaur Rahman, Amir Mosavi · 6 authors
Security, privacy, and transparency aspects of the Internet of Things (IoT) sensors have recently raised significant concerns among the public and policymakers. The distributed ledger and Blockchain technologies had brought solutions through transparently bridging two or multiple untrusted parties. In this research, a novel architecture for a smart building system, including a control system and automatic approaches, is proposed. An efficient cluster head selection algorithm is proposed to select the desired cluster head with the consideration of low energy consumption and fast head selection. An enhanced combination of IoT forwarding devices and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technology is further advanced. Furthermore, the proposed “DistBlockBuilding” architecture is implemented for managing a safe and secure data transfer from one surface to another surface. Besides, Blockchain technology is performed for transferring data within the smart building. Finally, the performance of IoT-SDN based secured networks is evaluated.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is gradually becoming mature and has already entered our daily life, which interconnects more machines and makes communication more convenient and more intelligent. Massive IoT devices produce innumerable data which need to be analyzed in joint cloud computation (JointCloud) with diversified services. However, due to the weak security of IoT devices, the existing JointCloud architecture hardly provides a secure trusted trade environment for users, which affects severely the application in the IoT network. In this article, we propose a hierarchical trust networking architecture based on permissioned blockchain to implement JointCloud (HTJC). The proposed Hyperledger fabric-based architecture has a better performance than those based on Ethereum in latency. By introducing the credit bonus-penalty strategy (CBPS), HTJC can solve the trust problem and provide users with a secure trusted trade environment. The availability of the proposed architecture is evaluated and compared to the existing models. The numerical results show that the HTJC can defend distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and provide users with a trusted and effective trade platform.
Blockchain, Software Defined Networking (SDN) and the Internet of Things (IoT) are the leading emerging technology all over the world. Blockchain is the main contributor to Bitcoin which aims to ignore the third party among the proceedings. On the contrary, the aims of the IoT network is connected with a massive number of objects over the internet. For smart cities, a distributed secure Blockchain-based SDN-IoT architecture has been proposed in this research paper with Network Function Virtualization (NFV) implementation. We have also revolved around the blockchain network which is a highly secured technology that provides good results in network performances, adaptability, privacy, security, accessibility, versatility, confidentiality, and efficiency. Moreover, we have presented a cluster head selection algorithm which aim is to select the desired head of the clusters. In addition, an approach has been also developed that is more efficient for generating a cluster head utilizing SDN-IoT. SDN-IoT with the NFV conception bring in benefits to the associated areas in terms of energy preservation and load equilibrating. In the projected architecture, the Blockchain network allows more prominent security of each network layer relative to the schematic network.
A DDoS attack is a spiteful attempt to disrupt legitimate traffic to a server by overwhelming the target with a flood of requests from geographically dispersed systems. Today attackers prefer DDoS attack methods to disrupt target services as they generate GBs to TBs of random data to flood the target. In existing mitigation strategies, because of lack of resources and not having the flexibility to cope with attacks by themselves, they are not considered to be that effective. So effective DDoS mitigation techniques can be provided using emerging technologies such as blockchain and SDN(Software-Defined Networking). We propose an architecture where a smart contract is deployed in a private blockchain, which facilitates a collaborative DDoS mitigation architecture across multiple network domains. Blockchain application is used as an additional security service. With Blockchain, shared protection is enabled among all hosts. With help of smart contracts, rules are distributed among all hosts. In addition, SDN can effectively enable services and security policies dynamically. This mechanism provides ASes(Autonomous Systems) the possibility to deploy their own DPS(DDoS Prevention Service) and there is no need to transfer control of the network to the third party. This paper focuses on the challenges of protecting a hybridized enterprise from the ravages of rapidly evolving Distributed Denial of Service(DDoS) attack.
Oluwakayode Onireti, Lei Zhang, Muhammad Ali Imran
Distributed systems are crucial to the full realization of the Internet of Thing (IoT) ecosystem as it mitigates the challenges of trust, security, and scalability associated with the traditional centralized approach. In this paper, we present an analytical modeling framework for Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT)-a consensus method for blockchain in IoT networks. We define the viable area for the wireless PBFT networks which guarantees the minimum number of replica nodes required for achieving the protocol's safety and liveliness. We also present an analytical framework for obtaining the viable area which we later utilize for power optimization. Results show that significant energy saving can be achieved with the utilization of the viable area concept in wireless PBFT networks. The proposed framework can serve as a theoretical guidance for practical PBFT based wireless blockchain network deployment.
Zakaria Abou El Houda, Abdelhakim Hafid, Lyes Khoukhi
The recent proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) is paving the way for the emergence of smart cities, where billions of IoT devices are interconnected to provide novel pervasive services and automate our daily lives tasks (e.g., smart healthcare, smart home). However, as the number of insecure IoT devices continues to grow at a rapid rate, the impact of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks is growing rapidly. With the advent of IoT botnets such as Mirai, the view towards IoT has changed from enabler of smart cities into a powerful amplifying tool for cyberattacks. This motivates the development of new techniques to provide flexibility and efficiency of decision making on the attack collaboration in a software defined networks (SDN) context. The new emerging technologies, such as SDN and blockchain, introduce new opportunities for low-cost, efficient and flexible DDoS attacks collaboration for the IoT based environment. In this paper, we propose Co-IoT, a blockchain-based framework for collaborative DDoS mitigation; it uses the concept of smart contracts (i.e., Ethereum's smart contracts) to facilitate the collaboration among SDN-based domains and transfer attacks information in a decentralized manner. The implementation of Co-IoT is deployed on Ethereum official test network Ropsten [1]. The experimental results confirm that Co-IoT achieves flexibility, efficiency, security and cost effectiveness making it a promising approach to mitigate large scale DDoS attacks.
Shifeng Ding, Gangxiang Shen, Kevin X. Pan, Sanjay K. Bose · 6 authors
In communication networks, network virtualization can usually provide better capacity utilization and quality of service (QoS) than what can be achieved otherwise. Under this operation, once the capacity of a virtual optical network (VON) is allocated, it will be static for a certain period, for example, a service contract period. However, in reality, the actual traffic demand of a VON always fluctuates, which would lead to a mismatch between the capacity assigned and the actual traffic demand carried. This mismatch would further cause degradation of provisioned network services and inefficiency in assigned network capacity. To overcome this issue, we propose a new scheme, called spectrum trading (ST), to trade spectrum resources between VONs in the context of an elastic optical network (EON). The key idea is to allow different VONs to trade their spectrum resources according to their actual capacity requirement at different time instants. A VON with unused spectra can trade away its unused spectra to other VONs that are short of spectrum resources at that time. in exchange, it is rewarded with some credit for its contribution to the ST community, which it can then use later to obtain extra capacity, if needed. The trust-worthiness of the trading records between the VONs is ensured in a distributed fashion through a blockchain- assisted ledger that is updated whenever a new trade occurs. A software-defined control plane is also developed to enable spectrum trading with the support of the blockchain-assisted ledger. The performance of the ST scheme is evaluated and compared with the scenario without such trading. Results show that the proposed ST scheme is efficient in improving the QoS of each VON and significantly improves overall network capacity utilization.
Internet of things (IoT) has made human life simpler through its numerous applications by interconnecting various devices and people together in a heterogeneous network. The number of users associated with IoT in different sectors such as media, intelligent transportation, and healthcare are increasing rapidly, therefore generating a large amount of data each day. Because of this, maintaining quality in the network has become an important aspect for end-to-end data delivery. Software defined networking thus provides flexibility and programmability to the network due to its global approach of network management. To adapt with the dynamic nature of QoS, blockchain technique with its encryption mechanism and distributed consensus algorithm can be deployed on SDN. In this paper, we propose the use of blockchain technology in Software-Defined Internet of Things to deliver high QoS at a low price.
At present, the software-defined network lacks a complete security mechanism for guarantee stream rule integrity, which contributes to attackers to trigger a variety of destructive network attacks through malicious tampering. Based on the non-tamperable performance of the blockchain technology and the characteristics of decentralization, this paper proposes a blockchain-based SDN security model, which could ensure the integrity of the network information by saving SDN flow rules, node identity and privilege information, and controller global information to the blockchain. The model establishes a distributed authentication mechanism through the blockchain network, which alleviates the problem that traditional centralized authentication is vulnerable to single-point attacks. In addition, the model performs role-based rights management based on data uplink storage and distributed authentication. Also, the Markov model is used to analyze the security performance of the blockchain-based SDN model. Analysis and simulation results show that the model can significantly improve the security performance of SDN.
Yustus Eko Oktian, Elizabeth Nathania Witanto, Sandra Kumi, Sang-Gon Lee
In general shared internet service, the ISP shares a static bandwidth resource pool to multiple customers in the same neighborhood area. The users' internet speed wavers when the number of customers accessing the same resource is increasing. The issue becomes problematic during peak hours. Many customers are expected to use the limited bandwidth simultaneously, thus deteriorating the overall user experiences. The ISP is subject to blame when such incidents happen; the customers claim the ISP breaks the Service Level Agreement by providing lower internet speed than the one the ISP marketed. It is a dilemma for the ISP, increasing the bandwidth resource pool may solve the problem. However, when the peak hours period is over, the additional bandwidth becomes useless, thereby generating the over-allocation problem. In this paper, we propose the use of blockchain and SDN to provide agile network bandwidth management for the ISP in the form of three use cases: Bandwidth on Demand, Selling Bandwidth, and Real-Time Pricing. We argue that using these proposed use cases, the ISP can serve the customer fairly, while also generating more appealing economics to compete in the modern market.
The past decade has witnessed an explosive growth in cryptocurrencies, but the blockchain-based cryptocurrencies have also raised many concerns, among which a crucial one is the scalability issue. Suffering from the large overhead of global consensus and security assurance, even the leading cryptocurrencies can only handle up to tens of transactions per second, which largely limits their applications in real-world scenarios. Among many proposals to improve the cryptocurrency scalability, one of the most promising and mature solutions is the payment channel network (PCN), which offers the off-chain settlement of transactions with minimal involvement of expensive blockchain operations. However, transaction failures may occur due to external attacks or unexpected conditions, e.g., an uncooperative user becoming unresponsive. In this paper, we present a distributed robust payment routing protocol RobustPay to resist transaction failures, which achieves robustness, efficiency and distributedness. Moreover, we modify the original HTLC protocol and adapt it to the robust payment routing protocol.
Wireless network virtualization is regarded as a technology to enable sharing of physical wireless infrastructure and RF slices for improving not only wireless network capacity and coverage but also wireless security. This article provides a perspective of fusion of three emerging technologies: SDN, EC, and blockchain technology for wireless network virtualization. SDN, with the help of controllers, allows dynamic configuration of network resources for their efficient management. EC not only helps to process user signals and queries at respective base stations with the shortest possible delay, but also helps to avoid the need of a high-speed backhaul link between a base station and centralized controllers. Blockchain technology protects owners of wireless infrastructures from a double spending attack that allocates the same wireless resource (RF slice) to multiple virtual wireless networks. The proposed approach aims to reduce business friction and increase the trust and transparency in the wireless networking industry.
Yoshitomi Eduardo Maehara Aliaga, Diego Fernandes Gonçalves Martins, Marco Aurélio Amaral Henriques
Neste trabalho apresentamos uma proposta mecanismo de consenso para blockchain baseado em PoS, que viabiliza a participação de usuários de uma maneira mais justa. Através da utilização de tempo discreto o protocolo utiliza rodadas, onde apenas participantes que passaram no desafio da rodada possam gerar o bloco. O protocolo garante uma participação mais igualitária pois não é possível gerar o bloco antes da próxima rodada esperada.