Sea Turtle Foraging Optimization-Based Controller Placement with Blockchain-Assisted Intrusion Detection in Software-Defined Networks

Software-defined networking(SDN)algorithms are gaining increas-ing interest and are making networks flexible and agile.The basic idea of SDN is to move the control planes to more than one server’s named controllers and limit the data planes to numerous sending network components,enabling flexible and dynamic network management.A distinctive characteristic of SDN is that it can logically centralize the control plane by utilizing many physical controllers.The deployment of the controller—that is,the controller placement problem(CPP)—becomes a vital model challenge.Through the advancements of blockchain technology,data integrity between nodes can be enhanced with no requirement for a trusted third party.Using the lat-est developments in blockchain technology,this article designs a novel sea turtle foraging optimization algorithm for the controller placement problem(STFOA-CPP)with blockchain-based intrusion detection in an SDN environ-ment.The major intention of the STFOA-CPP technique is the maximization of lifetime,network connectivity,and load balancing with the minimization of latency.In addition,the STFOA-CPP technique is based on the sea turtles’food-searching characteristics of tracking the odour path of dimethyl sulphide(DMS)released from food sources.Moreover,the presented STFOA-CPP technique can adapt with the controller’s count mandated and the shift to controller mapping to variable network traffic.Finally,the blockchain can inspect the data integrity,determine significantly malicious input,and improve the robust nature of developing a trust relationship between sev-eral nodes in the SDN.To demonstrate the improved performance of the STFOA-CPP algorithm,a wide-ranging experimental analysis was carried out.The extensive comparison study highlighted the improved outcomes of the STFOA-CPP technique over other recent approaches.

Toward Secure Software-Defined Networks Using Machine Learning: A Review, Research Challenges, and Future Directions

Over the past few years,rapid advancements in the internet and communication technologies have led to increasingly intricate and diverse networking systems.As a result,greater intelligence is necessary to effectively manage,optimize,and maintain these systems.Due to their distributed nature,machine learning models are challenging to deploy in traditional networks.However,Software-Defined Networking(SDN)presents an opportunity to integrate intelligence into networks by offering a programmable architecture that separates data and control planes.SDN provides a centralized network view and allows for dynamic updates of flow rules and softwarebased traffic analysis.While the programmable nature of SDN makes it easier to deploy machine learning techniques,the centralized control logic also makes it vulnerable to cyberattacks.To address these issues,recent research has focused on developing powerful machine-learning methods for detecting and mitigating attacks in SDN environments.This paper highlighted the countermeasures for cyberattacks on SDN and how current machine learningbased solutions can overcome these emerging issues.We also discuss the pros and cons of using machine learning algorithms for detecting and mitigating these attacks.Finally,we highlighted research issues,gaps,and challenges in developing machine learning-based solutions to secure the SDN controller,to help the research and network community to develop more robust and reliable solutions.

On the use of the genetic programming for balanced load distribution in software-defined networks

As a new networking paradigm,Software-Defined Networking(SDN)enables us to cope with the limitations of traditional networks.SDN uses a controller that has a global view of the network and switch devices which act as packet forwarding hardware,known as“OpenFlow switches”.Since load balancing service is essential to distribute workload across servers in data centers,we propose an effective load balancing scheme in SDN,using a genetic programming approach,called Genetic Programming based Load Balancing(GPLB).We formulate the problem to find a path:1)with the best bottleneck switch which has the lowest capacity within bottleneck switches of each path,2)with the shortest path,and 3)requiring the less possible operations.For the purpose of choosing the real-time least loaded path,GPLB immediately calculates the integrated load of paths based on the information that receives from the SDN controller.Hence,in this design,the controller sends the load information of each path to the load balancing algorithm periodically and then the load balancing algorithm returns a least loaded path to the controller.In this paper,we use the Mininet emulator and the OpenDaylight controller to evaluate the effectiveness of the GPLB.The simulative study of the GPLB shows that there is a big improvement in performance metrics and the latency and the jitter are minimized.The GPLB also has the maximum throughput in comparison with related works and has performed better in the heavy traffic situation.The results show that our model stands smartly while not increasing further overhead.

Joint Content Placement and Traffic Management for Cloud Mobile Video Distribution over Software-Defined Networks

To cope with the rapid growth of mobile video, video providers have leveraged cloud technologies to deploy their mobile video service system for more cost-effective and scalable performance. The emergence of Software-Defined Networking(SDN) provides a promising solution to manage the underlying network. In this paper, we introduce an SDN-enabled cloud mobile video distribution architecture and propose a joint video placement, request dispatching and traffic management mechanism to improve user experience and reduce the system operational cost. We use a utility function to capture the two aspects of user experience: the level of satisfaction and average latency, and formulate the joint optimization problem as a mixed integer programming problem. We develop an optimal algorithm based on dual decomposition and prove its optimality. We conduct simulations to evaluate the performance of our algorithm and the results show that our strategy can effectively cut down the total cost and guarantee user experience.

Artificial Intelligence Based Reliable Load Balancing Framework in Software-Defined Networks

Software-defined networking(SDN)plays a critical role in transforming networking from traditional to intelligent networking.The increasing demand for services from cloud users has increased the load on the network.An efficient system must handle various loads and increasing needs representing the relationships and dependence of businesses on automated measurement systems and guarantee the quality of service(QoS).Themultiple paths from source to destination give a scope to select an optimal path by maintaining an equilibrium of load using some best algorithms.Moreover,the requests need to be transferred to reliable network elements.To address SDN’s current and future challenges,there is a need to know how artificial intelligence(AI)optimization techniques can efficiently balance the load.This study aims to explore two artificial intelligence optimization techniques,namely Ant Colony Optimization(ACO)and Particle Swarm Optimization(PSO),used for load balancing in SDN.Further,we identified that a modification to the existing optimization technique could improve the performance by using a reliable link and node to form the path to reach the target node and improve load balancing.Finally,we propose a conceptual framework for SDN futurology by evaluating node and link reliability,which can balance the load efficiently and improve QoS in SDN.

A Novel Method for Routing Optimization in Software-Defined Networks

Software-defined network(SDN)is a new form of network architecture that has programmability,ease of use,centralized control,and protocol independence.It has received high attention since its birth.With SDN network architecture,network management becomes more efficient,and programmable interfaces make network operations more flexible and can meet the different needs of various users.The mainstream communication protocol of SDN is OpenFlow,which contains aMatch Field in the flow table structure of the protocol,which matches the content of the packet header of the data received by the switch,and completes the corresponding actions according to the matching results,getting rid of the dependence on the protocol to avoid designing a new protocol.In order to effectively optimize the routing forSDN,this paper proposes a novel algorithm based on reinforcement learning.The proposed technique canmaximize numerous objectives to dynamically update the routing strategy,and it has great generality and is not reliant on any specific network state.The control of routing strategy is more complicated than many Q-learning-based algorithms due to the employment of reinforcement learning.The performance of the method is tested by experiments using the OMNe++simulator.The experimental results reveal that our PPO-based SDN routing control method has superior performance and stability than existing algorithms.

On Reliability-optimized Controller Placement for Software-Defined Networks

By decoupling control plane and data plane,Software-Defined Networking(SDN) approach simplifies network management and speeds up network innovations.These benefits have led not only to prototypes,but also real SDN deployments.For wide-area SDN deployments,multiple controllers are often required,and the placement of these controllers becomes a particularly important task in the SDN context.This paper studies the problem of placing controllers in SDNs,so as to maximize the reliability of SDN control networks.We present a novel metric,called expected percentage of control path loss,to characterize the reliability of SDN control networks.We formulate the reliability-aware control placement problem,prove its NP-hardness,and examine several placement algorithms that can solve this problem.Through extensive simulations using real topologies,we show how the number of controllers and their placement influence the reliability of SDN control networks.Besides,we also found that,through strategic controller placement,the reliability of SDN control networks can be significantly improved without introducing unacceptable switch-to-controller latencies.

Migration to Software-Defined Networks:the Customers' View

Software Defined Networking(SDN) provides a flexible and convenient way to support fine-grained traffic-engineering(TE). Besides, SDN also provides better Quality of Experience(QoE) for customers. However, the policy of the evolution from legacy networks to the SDNs overemphasizes the controllability of the network or TE while ignoring the customers' benefit. Standing in the customers' position, we propose an optimization scheme, named as Optimal Migration Schedule based on Customers' Benefit(OMSB), to produce an optimized migration schedule and maximize the benefit of customers. Not only the quality and quantity of paths availed by migration, but also the number of flows from the customers that can use these multi-paths are taken into consideration for the scheduling. We compare the OMSB with other six migration schemes in terms of the benefit of customers. Our results suggest that the sequence of the migration plays a vital role for customers, especially in the early stages of the network migration to the SDN.

Achieving Consistence for Cross-Domain WAN Control in Software-Defined Networks

When applying Software-Defined Networks(SDN) to WANs,the SDN flexibility enables the cross-domain control to achieve a better control scalability.However,the control consistence is required by all the cross-domain services,to ensure the data plane configured in consensus for different domains.Such consistence process is complicated by potential failure and errors of WANs.In this paper,we propose a consistence layer to actively and passively snapshot the cross-domain control states,to reduce the complexities of service realizations.We implement the layer and evaluate performance in the PlanetLab testbed for the WAN emulation.The testbed conditions are extremely enlarged comparing to the real network.The results show its scalability,reliability and responsiveness in dealing with the control dynamics.In the normalized results,the active and passive snapshots are executed with the mean times of 1.873 s and 105 ms in135 controllers,indicating its readiness to be used in the real network.

Threshold-Based Software-Defined Networking(SDN)Solution for Healthcare Systems against Intrusion Attacks

The healthcare sector holds valuable and sensitive data.The amount of this data and the need to handle,exchange,and protect it,has been increasing at a fast pace.Due to their nature,software-defined networks(SDNs)are widely used in healthcare systems,as they ensure effective resource utilization,safety,great network management,and monitoring.In this sector,due to the value of thedata,SDNs faceamajor challengeposed byawide range of attacks,such as distributed denial of service(DDoS)and probe attacks.These attacks reduce network performance,causing the degradation of different key performance indicators(KPIs)or,in the worst cases,a network failure which can threaten human lives.This can be significant,especially with the current expansion of portable healthcare that supports mobile and wireless devices for what is called mobile health,or m-health.In this study,we examine the effectiveness of using SDNs for defense against DDoS,as well as their effects on different network KPIs under various scenarios.We propose a threshold-based DDoS classifier(TBDC)technique to classify DDoS attacks in healthcare SDNs,aiming to block traffic considered a hazard in the form of a DDoS attack.We then evaluate the accuracy and performance of the proposed TBDC approach.Our technique shows outstanding performance,increasing the mean throughput by 190.3%,reducing the mean delay by 95%,and reducing packet loss by 99.7%relative to normal,with DDoS attack traffic.

Multi-Attack Intrusion Detection System for Software-Defined Internet of Things Network

Currently,the Internet of Things(IoT)is revolutionizing communi-cation technology by facilitating the sharing of information between different physical devices connected to a network.To improve control,customization,flexibility,and reduce network maintenance costs,a new Software-Defined Network(SDN)technology must be used in this infrastructure.Despite the various advantages of combining SDN and IoT,this environment is more vulnerable to various attacks due to the centralization of control.Most methods to ensure IoT security are designed to detect Distributed Denial-of-Service(DDoS)attacks,but they often lack mechanisms to mitigate their severity.This paper proposes a Multi-Attack Intrusion Detection System(MAIDS)for Software-Defined IoT Networks(SDN-IoT).The proposed scheme uses two machine-learning algorithms to improve detection efficiency and provide a mechanism to prevent false alarms.First,a comparative analysis of the most commonly used machine-learning algorithms to secure the SDN was performed on two datasets:the Network Security Laboratory Knowledge Discovery in Databases(NSL-KDD)and the Canadian Institute for Cyberse-curity Intrusion Detection Systems(CICIDS2017),to select the most suitable algorithms for the proposed scheme and for securing SDN-IoT systems.The algorithms evaluated include Extreme Gradient Boosting(XGBoost),K-Nearest Neighbor(KNN),Random Forest(RF),Support Vector Machine(SVM),and Logistic Regression(LR).Second,an algorithm for selecting the best dataset for machine learning in Intrusion Detection Systems(IDS)was developed to enable effective comparison between the datasets used in the development of the security scheme.The results showed that XGBoost and RF are the best algorithms to ensure the security of SDN-IoT and to be applied in the proposed security system,with average accuracies of 99.88%and 99.89%,respectively.Furthermore,the proposed security scheme reduced the false alarm rate by 33.23%,which is a significant improvement over prevalent schemes.Finally,tests of the algorithm for dataset selection showed that the rates of false positives and false negatives were reduced when the XGBoost and RF algorithms were trained on the CICIDS2017 dataset,making it the best for IDS compared to the NSL-KDD dataset.

Pluggable multitask diffractive neural networks based on cascaded metasurfaces

Optical neural networks have significant advantages in terms of power consumption,parallelism,and high computing speed,which has intrigued extensive attention in both academic and engineering communities.It has been considered as one of the powerful tools in promoting the fields of imaging processing and object recognition.However,the existing optical system architecture cannot be reconstructed to the realization of multi-functional artificial intelligence systems simultaneously.To push the development of this issue,we propose the pluggable diffractive neural networks(P-DNN),a general paradigm resorting to the cascaded metasurfaces,which can be applied to recognize various tasks by switching internal plug-ins.As the proof-of-principle,the recognition functions of six types of handwritten digits and six types of fashions are numerical simulated and experimental demonstrated at near-infrared regimes.Encouragingly,the proposed paradigm not only improves the flexibility of the optical neural networks but paves the new route for achieving high-speed,low-power and versatile artificial intelligence systems.

Activation Redistribution Based Hybrid Asymmetric Quantization Method of Neural Networks

The demand for adopting neural networks in resource-constrained embedded devices is continuously increasing.Quantization is one of the most promising solutions to reduce computational cost and memory storage on embedded devices.In order to reduce the complexity and overhead of deploying neural networks on Integeronly hardware,most current quantization methods use a symmetric quantization mapping strategy to quantize a floating-point neural network into an integer network.However,although symmetric quantization has the advantage of easier implementation,it is sub-optimal for cases where the range could be skewed and not symmetric.This often comes at the cost of lower accuracy.This paper proposed an activation redistribution-based hybrid asymmetric quantizationmethod for neural networks.The proposedmethod takes data distribution into consideration and can resolve the contradiction between the quantization accuracy and the ease of implementation,balance the trade-off between clipping range and quantization resolution,and thus improve the accuracy of the quantized neural network.The experimental results indicate that the accuracy of the proposed method is 2.02%and 5.52%higher than the traditional symmetric quantization method for classification and detection tasks,respectively.The proposed method paves the way for computationally intensive neural network models to be deployed on devices with limited computing resources.Codes will be available on https://github.com/ycjcy/Hybrid-Asymmetric-Quantization.

Biodiversity metrics on ecological networks: Demonstrated with animal gastrointestinal microbiomes

Biodiversity has become a terminology familiar to virtually every citizen in modern societies.It is said that ecology studies the economy of nature,and economy studies the ecology of humans;then measuring biodiversity should be similar with measuring national wealth.Indeed,there have been many parallels between ecology and economics,actually beyond analogies.For example,arguably the second most widely used biodiversity metric,Simpson(1949)’s diversity index,is a function of familiar Gini-index in economics.One of the biggest challenges has been the high“diversity”of diversity indexes due to their excessive“speciation”-there are so many indexes,similar to each country’s sovereign currency-leaving confused diversity practitioners in dilemma.In 1973,Hill introduced the concept of“numbers equivalent”,which is based on Renyi entropy and originated in economics,but possibly due to his abstruse interpretation of the concept,his message was not widely received by ecologists until nearly four decades later.What Hill suggested was similar to link the US dollar to gold at the rate of$35 per ounce under the Bretton Woods system.The Hill numbers now are considered most appropriate biodiversity metrics system,unifying Shannon,Simpson and other diversity indexes.Here,we approach to another paradigmatic shift-measuring biodiversity on ecological networks-demonstrated with animal gastrointestinal microbiomes representing four major invertebrate classes and all six vertebrate classes.The network diversity can reveal the diversity of species interactions,which is a necessary step for understanding the spatial and temporal structures and dynamics of biodiversity across environmental gradients.

A data-driven model of drop size prediction based on artificial neural networks using small-scale data sets

An artificial neural network(ANN)method is introduced to predict drop size in two kinds of pulsed columns with small-scale data sets.After training,the deviation between calculate and experimental results are 3.8%and 9.3%,respectively.Through ANN model,the influence of interfacial tension and pulsation intensity on the droplet diameter has been developed.Droplet size gradually increases with the increase of interfacial tension,and decreases with the increase of pulse intensity.It can be seen that the accuracy of ANN model in predicting droplet size outside the training set range is reach the same level as the accuracy of correlation obtained based on experiments within this range.For two kinds of columns,the drop size prediction deviations of ANN model are 9.6%and 18.5%and the deviations in correlations are 11%and 15%.

Influencer identification of dynamical networks based on an information entropy dimension reduction method

Identifying critical nodes or sets in large-scale networks is a fundamental scientific problem and one of the key research directions in the fields of data mining and network science when implementing network attacks, defense, repair and control.Traditional methods usually begin from the centrality, node location or the impact on the largest connected component after node destruction, mainly based on the network structure.However, these algorithms do not consider network state changes.We applied a model that combines a random connectivity matrix and minimal low-dimensional structures to represent network connectivity.By using mean field theory and information entropy to calculate node activity,we calculated the overlap between the random parts and fixed low-dimensional parts to quantify the influence of node impact on network state changes and ranked them by importance.We applied this algorithm and the proposed importance algorithm to the overall analysis and stratified analysis of the C.elegans neural network.We observed a change in the critical entropy of the network state and by utilizing the proposed method we can calculate the nodes that indirectly affect muscle cells through neural layers.

Verifying hierarchical network nonlocality in general quantum networks

Recently, a class of innovative notions on quantum network nonlocality(QNN), called full quantum network nonlocality(FQNN), have been proposed in Phys. Rev. Lett. 128 010403(2022). As the generalization of full network nonlocality(FNN), l-level quantum network nonlocality(l-QNN) was defined in arxiv. 2306.15717 quant-ph(2024). FQNN is a NN that can be generated only from a network with all sources being non-classical. This is beyond the existing standard network nonlocality, which may be generated from a network with only a non-classical source. One of the challenging tasks is to establish corresponding Bell-like inequalities to demonstrate the FQNN or l-QNN. Up to now, the inequality criteria for FQNN and l-QNN have only been established for star and chain networks. In this paper, we devote ourselves to establishing Bell-like inequalities for networks with more complex structures. Note that star and chain networks are special kinds of tree-shaped networks. We first establish the Bell-like inequalities for verifying l-QNN in k-forked tree-shaped networks. Such results generalize the existing inequalities for star and chain networks. Furthermore, we find the Bell-like inequality criteria for l-QNN for general acyclic and cyclic networks. Finally, we discuss the demonstration of l-QNN in the well-known butterfly networks.

Source localization in signed networks with effective distance

While progress has been made in information source localization,it has overlooked the prevalent friend and adversarial relationships in social networks.This paper addresses this gap by focusing on source localization in signed network models.Leveraging the topological characteristics of signed networks and transforming the propagation probability into effective distance,we propose an optimization method for observer selection.Additionally,by using the reverse propagation algorithm we present a method for information source localization in signed networks.Extensive experimental results demonstrate that a higher proportion of positive edges within signed networks contributes to more favorable source localization,and the higher the ratio of propagation rates between positive and negative edges,the more accurate the source localization becomes.Interestingly,this aligns with our observation that,in reality,the number of friends tends to be greater than the number of adversaries,and the likelihood of information propagation among friends is often higher than among adversaries.In addition,the source located at the periphery of the network is not easy to identify.Furthermore,our proposed observer selection method based on effective distance achieves higher operational efficiency and exhibits higher accuracy in information source localization,compared with three strategies for observer selection based on the classical full-order neighbor coverage.

Impact of different interaction behavior on epidemic spreading in time-dependent social networks

We investigate the impact of pairwise and group interactions on the spread of epidemics through an activity-driven model based on time-dependent networks.The effects of pairwise/group interaction proportion and pairwise/group interaction intensity are explored by extensive simulation and theoretical analysis.It is demonstrated that altering the group interaction proportion can either hinder or enhance the spread of epidemics,depending on the relative social intensity of group and pairwise interactions.As the group interaction proportion decreases,the impact of reducing group social intensity diminishes.The ratio of group and pairwise social intensity can affect the effect of group interaction proportion on the scale of infection.A weak heterogeneous activity distribution can raise the epidemic threshold,and reduce the scale of infection.These results benefit the design of epidemic control strategy.

The Immense Impact of Reverse Edges on Large Hierarchical Networks

Hierarchical networks are frequently encountered in animal groups,gene networks,and artificial engineering systems such as multiple robots,unmanned vehicle systems,smart grids,wind farm networks,and so forth.The structure of a large directed hierarchical network is often strongly influenced by reverse edges from lower-to higher-level nodes,such as lagging birds’howl in a flock or the opinions of lowerlevel individuals feeding back to higher-level ones in a social group.This study reveals that,for most large-scale real hierarchical networks,the majority of the reverse edges do not affect the synchronization process of the entire network;the synchronization process is influenced only by a small part of these reverse edges along specific paths.More surprisingly,a single effective reverse edge can slow down the synchronization of a huge hierarchical network by over 60%.The effect of such edges depends not on the network size but only on the average in-degree of the involved subnetwork.The overwhelming majority of active reverse edges turn out to have some kind of“bunching”effect on the information flows of hierarchical networks,which slows down synchronization processes.This finding refines the current understanding of the role of reverse edges in many natural,social,and engineering hierarchical networks,which might be beneficial for precisely tuning the synchronization rhythms of these networks.Our study also proposes an effective way to attack a hierarchical network by adding a malicious reverse edge to it and provides some guidance for protecting a network by screening out the specific small proportion of vulnerable nodes.