A Blockchain-based SDN East/West Interface

The Internet has reached a breaking point, enabling ubiquitous accessibility to all digital demands. Though people have accelerated their use of overall digital demands due to the convenience of the Internet, where nearly everything is connected and accessible, it is becoming increasingly difficult to manage and modify networks. It is always a challenge to meet the emerging needs of network industry. SDN framework was proposed to overcome traditional network architecture (TNA) restrictions in order to cope with contemporary network management in terms of flexibility, agility, responding to faults, and dynamic changes. SDN assists network operators by uncoupling the control plane from its underlying ternary content-addressable memory (TCAM) hardware often called as forwarding plane by allowing the networks to programme as per the anticipated network functionality. Now, switching from traditional to software-defined networking styles, it is worth to check the robustness of the open flow (south bound interface)-based controller platform and the capability of its fault tolerance attribute to approach the successful SDN implementation. The performance of SDN open flow controllers plays a vital role in SDN implementation, which is meant for the separation between control and data plane to leverage the life of network industry. This paper comprehensively surveys the contrast between traditional network architecture (TNA) and software-defined network architecture. This research work discusses about the best feasible SDN implementation, as well as the selection of a useful controller platform for overcoming traditional network constraints and the performance assessment criteria for SDN open flow controllers. Further, the survey is continued with possible literature or work done by various researchers on performance analysis and evaluation of open flow-based SDN controllers as well as in a group of two or more controllers with respect to multifarious network condition, network criteria/parameter/metric, scaling of network load resources with most important varying network topology design. Ultimately, it strives to point ongoing research omission with respect to controller’s performance bottleneck benchmark suggesting optimized solution when it is well experimented.KeywordsTraditional network architecture (TNA)Software-defined networking (SDN)SDN open flow controllersOpen flow protocolPerformance evaluation/analysis

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks represent a major concern in modern Software Defined Networking (SDN), as SDN controllers are sensitive points of failures in the whole SDN architecture. Recently, research on DDoS attacks detection in SDN has focused on investigation of how to leverage data plane programmability, enabled by P4 language, to detect attacks directly in network switches, with marginal involvement of SDN controllers. In order to effectively address cybersecurity management in SDN architectures, we investigate the potential of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms to perform automated DDoS Attacks Detection (DAD), specifically focusing on Transmission Control Protocol SYN flood attacks. We compare two different DAD architectures, called Standalone and Correlated DAD, where traffic features collection and attack detection are performed locally at network switches or in a single entity (e.g., in SDN controller), respectively. We combine the capability of ML and P4-enabled data planes to implement real-time DAD. Illustrative numerical results show that, for all tested ML algorithms, accuracy, precision, recall and F1-score are above 98% in most cases, and classification time is in the order of few hundreds of upmu text {s} in the worst case. Considering real-time DAD implementation, significant latency reduction is obtained when features are extracted at the data plane by using P4 language.Graphic

Software Defined Network (SDN) Technology made tremendous changes in networking field by controlling the hardware with remote software by decoupling data plane and control plane. The focus here is on the controller which is part of control plane. A controller is a central part of SDN; it is an intermediary between Data plane and Forwarding plane. It takes prime place in SDN architecture like Operating System in Computers. SDN Controller is a software which directs the packets using flow rules and also contains statistical information of network. The controller orchestrates the networking devices such as switches and routers by channelizing the packets. SDN controller has different flavor based on the commercial requirement achieved by including new pluggable module. This paper discusses some of the SDN Controller with their feature; the controllers are POX, NOX, Floodlight, ODL, Open Contrail. This paper also compares the characteristic of centralized and distributed controller by focusing on performance, bandwidth and round-trip time of Floodlight and Open Daylight (ODL) controller. The simulation is conducted using Mininet.

The demand for real-time data in a modern battlefield is increasing exponentially. As a result, current military network paradigms and architectures are struggling to cope with increasing capacity demands at the tactical edge. Unfortunately, rescaling existing network architectures will not be a permanent solution to the problem. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a 3- tiered Software Defined Networking (SDN) architecture consisting of heterogeneous Dense Networks (DenseNets), which is a highly condensed deployment of relatively small, lowpowered femtocells, at the tactical edge. The proposed 3-tiered SDN architecture abstracts the Land Tactical Network (LTN) as the Physical Layer, the Battlefield Tactical Network (BTN) as the Control Layer, and the Joint Task Force Headquarters (JTFHQ) as the Management Layer. The simulation and results confirm the architecture’s capability for providing interoperability between heterogeneous communications equipment and supporting high capacity demands within limited and unreliable networking infrastructure in battlefield environments.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a dynamic architecture that employs a variety of applications for making networks more adaptable and centrally controlled. It is easy to attack the entire network in SDN because the control plane and data plane are separated. DDoS attack is major danger to SDN service providers because it can shut down the entire network and stop services to all customers at any time. One of the key flaws of most SDN architectures is lack of susceptibility to DDoS attacks with its types like TCP flooding, UDP flooding, SYN flooding, ICMP flooding and DHCP flooding for detecting those kinds of attacks. The machine learning algorithms are widely used in recent years to identify DDoS attacks. This research utilizes Decision Tree Classifier for detection and classification of DDoS attacks on SDN. The Forward Feature Selection technique is also used in the research to select the best features from the dataset and from that dataset the data are employed to train and test the model by Decision Tree Classifier Algorithm. The decision Tree Classifier technique is a supervised method used to forecast desired values of observations using rudimentary machine learning decision rules derived from training data. Based on the accuracy of decision tree techniques, in future, a hybrid learning model will be designed for detecting the Distributed Denial of Services in an SDN environment with high accuracy and a low false negative rate.

Software-defined networking (SDN) attracts the attention of the research community in recent years, as evidenced by a large number of survey and review papers. The architecture of SDN clearly recognizes three planes: application, control, and data plane. The application plane executes network applications; control plane regulates the rules for the entire network based on the requests generated by network applications; and based on the set rules, the controller configures the switches in the data plane. The role of the switch in the data plane is to simply forward packets based on the instructions given by the controller. By analyzing SDN-related research papers, it is observed that research, from the very beginning, is insufficiently focused on the data plane. Therefore, this paper gives a comprehensive overview of the data plane survey with particular emphasis on the problem of programmability and flexibility. The first part of the survey is dedicated to the evaluation of actual data plane architectures through several definitions and aspects of data plane flexibility and programmability. Then, an overview of SDN-related research was presented with the aim of identifying key factors influencing the gradual deviation from the original data plane architectures given with ForCES and OpenFlow specifications, which we called the data plane evolution. By establishing a correlation between the treated problem and the problem-solving approaches, the limitations of ForCES and OpenFlow data plane architectures were identified. Based on identified limitations, a generalization of approaches to addressing the problem of data plane flexibility and programmability is made. By examining generalized approaches, open issues have been identified, establishing the grounds for future research directions proposal.

In traditional networking architecture, for each problem a specific protocol is dedicated to network devices and these devices are configured manually. Since they are hardware-based, the implementation of new ideas and technologies to these devices is very difficult. However, today's increasing use of smartphones and other mobile data devices has increased the data traffic, and with the addition of service diversity and the needs of users, the existing network structure has become much more complex. Software Defined Networks (SDN) is a new network paradigm that allows a programmable central controller mechanism which separates the control plane from the data plane. With the advantage of a centralized control mechanism, SDN ensures that network structures can respond more quickly to current demands, be more flexible and reprogrammable. In addition, all these processes are implemented at a lower cost compared to traditional networking architecture. To evaluate the performance of SDN architectures, testbeds are used by researchers. In this paper, a small-scale and cost-effective SDN testbed is designed and implemented. The testing environment is realized using Raspberry Pi 3, Floodlight and Open vSwitch. Controller performance has been observed with the MACtracker application.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) has come up as a promising technology for making the communication networks more flexible and dynamically (re)configurable. With the advent of fifth generation (5G) of mobile networks, the aforementioned flexibility became more urgent and critical than ever. SDN offers the decoupling of the network's control plane from the data plane. As a result, the infrastructure layer can be abstracted from the application and network services and therefore the network control can be done completely through a centralized component/orchestrator. In this work, a detailed practical deployment of an SDN controller for a converged FiberWireless (Fi-Wi) 5G network is presented, followed by the SDN architecture and functional components. Lastly, an experimental trial using an SDN controller directly connected to Fi-Wi lab equipment is described, in which the physical layer parameters are managed and monitored successfully, proving the applicability of SDN in a Fi-Wi network.

Software‐defined networking (SDN) is a relatively new approach in network management that proposes to separate the network control (Control plane) and the forwarding process (Data plane) to optimize the network infrastructure and improve network performance, controllability, manageability and flexibility. However, like every technology, SDN has brought its own new challenges in terms of security and scalability which are very important aspects that should be considered to design and build a resilient architecture in order to meet carrier grade network requirements. In this paper, we propose a secure SDN architecture with IEEE 802.1X port‐based authentication where we also consider the controller's scalability issue by devolving the access control capability to the data plane. In this way, we reduce the high demand and the workload on the SDN controller. Our proposed model presents a novel SDN network architecture and logical network segmentation which provides an optimal and secure network access with low latency. We have implemented and tested our architecture to show its performance (authentication delays). Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Software-defined networking (SDN) is a new networking architecture with a centralized control mechanism. SDN has proven to be successful in improving not only the network performance, but also security. However, centralized control in the SDN architecture is associated with new security vulnerabilities. In particular, user-datagram-protocol (UDP) flooding attacks can be easily launched and cause serious packet-transmission delays, controller-performance loss, and even network shutdown. In response to applications in the Internet of Things (IoT) field, this study considers UDP flooding attacks in SDN and proposes two lightweight countermeasures. The first method sometimes sacrifices address-resolution-protocol (ARP) requests to achieve a high level of security. In the second method, although packets must sometimes be sacrificed when undergoing an attack before starting to defend, the detection of the network state can prevent normal packets from being sacrificed. When blocking a network attack, attacks from the affected port are directly blocked without affecting normal ports. The performance and security of the proposed methods were confirmed by means of extensive experiments. Compared with the situation where no defense is implemented, or similar defense methods are implemented, after simulating a UDP flooding attack, our proposed method performed better in terms of the available bandwidth, central-processing-unit (CPU) consumption, and network delay time.

<span>The requirements <span>for the network are increasing by the expanding and spreading the Internet. The Previous techniques of the network do not meet the modern needs, thus, a new technical presents software-defined networking (SDN). SDN recognizes as a promising new model that separates the control plane (traffic routing and network topology) from the data plane (network architecture layers). The architecture of SDN has some features that find in a single controller or many controllers instance of programmable, flexible, and scalable. In the current SDN, multiple controllers are essential. Therefore, the optimal number of the controllers and their locations is the most significant challenge, known as the controller placement problem (CPP). It deploys the optimal number of controllers within the network while meeting presentations requirements considered conflicting in nature example: credibility, load balancing, latency, energy efficiency, and computation time. Many studies researched the ways to develop solutions for improving scalability, place selection for SDN. This paper presents the CPP and gives a comprehensive review of SDN issues based on the recent well-known research to extract available solution strategies. Finally, it discusses the limitations and future study directions that can support researchers in this field.</span></span>

The nature of computer network flash crowd traffic, which is generated by legitimate users accessing servers or other network resources are similar to the traffic generated by Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) like attacks. With advancement in spoof packet generation tools, attacker may generate Multi-source Multi-destination Multi-protocol (MMM) traffic; characteristics of such traffic are very similar to on-going genuine/ flash crowd traffic in the network. In the case of Software Defined Network (SDN), attacker’s target is controller plane. Controller plane in SDN is a centralized processing unit of the underlying network, which manages several data planes. Controller plane frames the policies and pushes forwarding rules to the data planes. Data planes just maintain the forwarding rules. Thus by overloading the SDN controller, functionality of complete computer network will be hampered. In this paper, we have proposed Media Access Control (MAC) address based Model to Differentiate Flash crowd and Malicious traffic in SDN (MDFMS). Novelty of the proposed model is to detect, locate and mitigate the source of Traditional DDoS (T-DDoS) and MMMDDoS traffic. MDFSM has been implemented on separate machine to avoid any additional computing load on SDN controller. It also preserves the original design of the SDN architecture. Proposed model has been evaluated under various scenarios and encouraging results have been obtained to differentiate T-DDoS and MMM-DDoS from benign flash crowd traffic.

The issue of supporting Quality of Service (QoS) for media applications and other different applications has increased tremendously in industry and the scholarly community. The traditional network architecture became overloaded and congested due to the continued demand for network resources and the limited bandwidth available. The user experience and the academic studies have indicated an increase in limitations and weaknesses of these architectures. A new network architecture paradigm, called Software-Defined Networks (SDN), has received massive attention from researchers and it is used to find new solutions to the limitations found in traditional network architectures. This survey presents an overview of QoS in a traditional network, as well as in SDN. The existing SDN platforms, controllers, and protocols are presented as well as the multimedia flow routing mechanisms being investigated. The survey outcomes will be useful for people in the industry as well as academic researchers identifying current limitations and challenges of QoS within SDN and traditional network architectures.

The software-defined network (SDNs) architecture can easily be attacked by a malicious user in order to prevent an acceptable level of service. Therefore, SDN security is a hot research topic to improve the SDN architecture and to protect the service level of the SDN components. In this letter, the INSPECTOR is a hardware device added to the SDN architecture to protect a compromised controller from a packet injection attack by verifying the authentication of Packet-In Messages accessing network resources. With simulations, we show that the INSPECTOR device efficiently stops the attack and enhances the controller performance under malicious attack.

The flexibility and programmability offered by Software Defined Networking (SDN) emerge as an approach to resolve some of the main challenges that the Internet of Things (IoT) deployments expose. In the present article, we explore the application of SDN components onto IoT deployments, together with the decoupling of typical gateway functions in two realms; the physical one and the virtual at the edge. This disengagement is a novel approach necessary since the computation resources on the physical part of the infrastructure are limited. Thus, the more resource-consuming processes are transferred to the edge of the network, in the virtual counterpart of the gateway. Additionally, within this infrastructure, different network applications can be running at the top of the SDN controller, in the control plane, for example, QoS policies application, management of network parameters, etc. Providing a holistic view of the IoT deployment. Between its advantages, this work focus on the ease of creation of an IoT infrastructure with the gateway and SDN architecture, and the behaviour of the IoT system. For validation, a small setup scenario and a use case is created where heterogeneous IoT sensors communicate with the physical part of the gateway, implemented with a Raspberry Pis and this, with its virtual part at the edge of the network, so finally sent the data to an IoT platform (FIWARE-ORION) at the core network managed by a virtual Switch (OpenVSwitch) and a RYU-based SDN controller.