LSSDNF: A Lightweight Secure Software Defined Network Framework for Future Internet in 5G–6G

Abstract

As information technology advances quickly, so does the 5G–6G network management system, which is moving toward greater integration, decentralization, diversity, and intelligence. As flexibility is a crucial criterion for 5G–6G network architecture, we use the Software Defined Network (SDN) paradigm to make the programmability more flexible. Due to their ability to replace the current TCP/IP architecture with one that separates the control plane and data plane, software-defined networks have gained much popularity. However, they are susceptible to routing attacks. Therefore, this work proposes Lightweight Security Framework that combines blockchain technology with Software-Defined Networking (LSSDNF) to address this problem. The proposed framework adds the routing data that the controller withheld to the multichain blockchain. Here, a mininet network simulator is used to model the proposed framework. The data transfer rate or network throughput, bandwidth variation, and jitter have all been used to assess the performance of single-controller-SDN networks and multi-controller-SDN networks. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework performs better than the conventional single-controller-SDN architecture in terms of throughput, bandwidth fluctuation, and jitter.