Intelligent Blockchain-Based Secure Routing for Multidomain SDN-Enabled IoT Networks

Abstract

The development of fifth-generation (5G) mobile communication technology has become a major driver to the growth of Internet of Things (IoT) applications. As a promising networking paradigm, software-defined networking (SDN) makes IoT more flexible and agile by decoupling control plane from data plane. With a large number of heterogeneous devices accessing to the network, we need to divide the network into several domains and each domain is managed by an SDN controller. Controllers share topologies with each other to form global view of the entire network, which is used for crossing-domain path routing. However, crossing-domain routing requires global trust between multiple controllers. The reason is that if the malicious controller shares misleading topologies, the rest of controllers may calculate mistaken crossing-domain paths. As a result, packets are forwarded to the domain that is managed by the malicious controller and dropped deliberately, which is known as the black-hole attack. To this end, we present a blockchain-based architecture to ensure secure routing among multiple domains in SDN-enabled IoT networks. All SDN controllers are equipped with blockchains, and they upload abstract topologies to the blockchain via the smart contract. Thus, the genuine view of the entire network can be gained from the blockchain due to its consensus and immutability. In addition, we use the concept of reputation that consists of the local reputation and the global reputation to further protect routing reliability, and the global reputation is reserved in the blockchain. Compared with benchmark architectures, the emulation results show that our proposed method can effectively build trust between multiple controllers and ensure secure routing among multiple domains.