Enhanced Mechanism for Link Failure Rerouting in Software-Defined Exchange Point Networks

Internet Exchange Point(IXP)is a system that increases network bandwidth performance.Internet exchange points facilitate interconnection among network providers,including Internet Service Providers(ISPs)andContent Delivery Providers(CDNs).To improve service management,Internet exchange point providers have adopted the Software Defined Network(SDN)paradigm.This implementation is known as a Software-Defined Exchange Point(SDX).It improves network providers’operations and management.However,performance issues still exist,particularly with multi-hop topologies.These issues include switch memory costs,packet processing latency,and link failure recovery delays.The paper proposes Enhanced Link Failure Rerouting(ELFR),an improved mechanism for rerouting link failures in software-defined exchange point networks.The proposed mechanism aims to minimize packet processing time for fast link failure recovery and enhance path calculation efficiency while reducing switch storage overhead by exploiting the Programming Protocol-independent Packet Processors(P4)features.The paper presents the proposed mechanisms’efficiency by utilizing advanced algorithms and demonstrating improved performance in packet processing speed,path calculation effectiveness,and switch storage management compared to current mechanisms.The proposed mechanism shows significant improvements,leading to a 37.5%decrease in Recovery Time(RT)and a 33.33%decrease in both Calculation Time(CT)and Computational Overhead(CO)when compared to current mechanisms.The study highlights the effectiveness and resource efficiency of the proposed mechanism in effectively resolving crucial issues inmulti-hop software-defined exchange point networks.

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.

Performance Evaluation of Topologies for Multi-Domain Software-Defined Networking

Software-defined networking(SDN)is widely used in multiple types of data center networks,and these distributed data center networks can be integrated into a multi-domain SDN by utilizing multiple controllers.However,the network topology of each control domain of SDN will affect the performance of the multidomain network,so performance evaluation is required before the deployment of the multi-domain SDN.Besides,there is a high cost to build real multi-domain SDN networks with different topologies,so it is necessary to use simulation testing methods to evaluate the topological performance of the multi-domain SDN network.As there is a lack of existing methods to construct a multi-domain SDN simulation network for the tool to evaluate the topological performance automatically,this paper proposes an automated multi-domain SDN topology performance evaluation framework,which supports multiple types of SDN network topologies in cooperating to construct a multi-domain SDN network.The framework integrates existing single-domain SDN simulation tools with network performance testing tools to realize automated performance evaluation of multidomain SDN network topologies.We designed and implemented a Mininet-based simulation tool that can connect multiple controllers and run user-specified topologies in multiple SDN control domains to build and test multi-domain SDN networks faster.Then,we used the tool to perform performance tests on various data center network topologies in single-domain and multi-domain SDN simulation environments.Test results show that Space Shuffle has the most stable performance in a single-domain environment,and Fat-tree has the best performance in a multi-domain environment.Also,this tool has the characteristics of simplicity and stability,which can meet the needs of multi-domain SDN topology performance evaluation.

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.

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 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.

A Survey: Typical Security Issues of Software-Defined Networking

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has been a hot topic for future network development, which implements the different layers of control plane and data plane respectively. Despite providing high openness and programmability, the “three-layer two-interface” architecture of SDN changes the traditional network and increases the network attack nodes, which results in new security issues. In this paper, we firstly introduced the background, architecture and working process of SDN. Secondly, we summarized and analyzed the typical security issues from north to south: application layer, northbound interface, control layer, southbound interface and data layer. Another contribution is to review and analyze the existing solutions and latest research progress of each layer, mainly including: authorized authentication module, application isolation, DoS/DDoS defense, multi-controller deployment and flow rule consistency detection. Finally, a conclusion about the future works of SDN security and an idealized global security architecture is proposed.

Quality of Service Improvement with Optimal Software-Defined Networking Controller and Control Plane Clustering

The controller is indispensable in software-defined networking(SDN).With several features,controllers monitor the network and respond promptly to dynamic changes.Their performance affects the quality-of-service(QoS)in SDN.Every controller supports a set of features.However,the support of the features may be more prominent in one controller.Moreover,a single controller leads to performance,single-point-of-failure(SPOF),and scalability problems.To overcome this,a controller with an optimum feature set must be available for SDN.Furthermore,a cluster of optimum feature set controllers will overcome an SPOF and improve the QoS in SDN.Herein,leveraging an analytical network process(ANP),we rank SDN controllers regarding their supporting features and create a hierarchical control plane based cluster(HCPC)of the highly ranked controller computed using the ANP,evaluating their performance for the OS3E topology.The results demonstrated in Mininet reveal that a HCPC environment with an optimum controller achieves an improved QoS.Moreover,the experimental results validated in Mininet show that our proposed approach surpasses the existing distributed controller clustering(DCC)schemes in terms of several performance metrics i.e.,delay,jitter,throughput,load balancing,scalability and CPU(central processing unit)utilization.

Challenge-based collaborative intrusion detection in software-defined networking: An evaluation

Software-Defined Networking(SDN)is an emerging architecture that enables a computer network to be intelligently and centrally controlled via software applications.It can help manage the whole network environment in a consistent and holistic way,without the need of understanding the underlying network structure.At present,SDN may face many challenges like insider attacks,i.e.,the centralized control plane would be attacked by malicious underlying devices and switches.To protect the security of SDN,effective detection approaches are indispensable.In the literature,challenge-based collaborative intrusion detection networks(CIDNs)are an effective detection framework in identifying malicious nodes.It calculates the nodes'reputation and detects a malicious node by sending out a special message called a challenge.In this work,we devise a challenge-based CIDN in SDN and measure its performance against malicious internal nodes.Our results demonstrate that such a mechanism can be effective in SDN environments.

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.

Orchestrating Network Functions in Software-Defined Networks

Software.defined networking(SDN) enables third.part companies to participate in the network function innovations. A number of instances for one network function will inevitably co.exist in the network. Although some orchestration architecture has been proposed to chain network functions, rare works are focused on how to optimize this process. In this paper, we propose an optimized model for network function orchestration, function combination model(FCM). Our main contributions are as following. First, network functions are featured with a new abstraction, and are open to external providers. And FCM identifies network functions using unique type, and organizes their instances distributed over the network with the appropriate way. Second, with the specialized demands, we can combine function instances under the global network views, and formulate it into the problem of Boolean linear program(BLP). A simulated annealing algorithm is designed to approach optimal solution for this BLP. Finally, the numerical experiment demonstrates that our model can create outstanding composite schemas efficiently.

Software-Defined Networking

Software- defined networking （SDN） is a promising technology for next-generation networking and has attracted much attention from academics, network equipment manufacturer, network operators, and service providers. It has found center, and enterprise networks. applications in mobile, data The SDN architecture has a centralized, programmable control plane that is separate from the data plane. SDN also provides the ability to control and manage virtualized resources and networks without requiring new hardware technologies. This is a major shift in networking technologies.

A movement-assisted software-defined sensor network with NFV support

A flexible and controllable movement-assisted software-defined sensor network(MA-SDSN)based on the software-defined network(SDN)and network function virtualization(NFV)is proposed.First,a three-layer fundamental architecture is proposed to overcome the inherent distributed management and rigidity of the conventional wireless sensor networks.Furthermore,the platform for research and development of MA-SDSN is established,and the dumb node(DN),the software-defined node(SN)and the movement-assisted node(MN)are designed and implemented.Then,the southbound application programming interface(API)is designed to provide a series of frames for communication between controllers and sensor nodes.The northbound API is developed and demonstrated overall and in detail.The functions of the controller are presented including topology discovery,dynamic networking,packet processing,mobility management and virtualization.Followed by the MA-SDSN network model,a Markov chain-based movement-assisted weighted relocation(MMWR)topology control algorithm is proposed to redeploy the MNs based on the node status and weight.Simulation results and analysis indicate that the proposed algorithm based on the MA-SDSN extends network lifetime with a lower average power consumption.

EARS: Intelligence-Driven Experiential Network Architecture for Automatic Routing in Software-Defined Networking

Software-Defined Networking(SDN)adapts logically-centralized control by decoupling control plane from data plane and provides the efficient use of network resources.However,due to the limitation of traditional routing strategies relying on manual configuration,SDN may suffer from link congestion and inefficient bandwidth allocation among flows,which could degrade network performance significantly.In this paper,we propose EARS,an intelligence-driven experiential network architecture for automatic routing.EARS adapts deep reinforcement learning(DRL)to simulate the human methods of learning experiential knowledge,employs the closed-loop network control mechanism incorporating with network monitoring technologies to realize the interaction with network environment.The proposed EARS can learn to make better control decision from its own experience by interacting with network environment and optimize the network intelligently by adjusting services and resources offered based on network requirements and environmental conditions.Under the network architecture,we design the network utility function with throughput and delay awareness,differentiate flows based on their size characteristics,and design a DDPGbased automatic routing algorithm as DRL decision brain to find the near-optimal paths for mice and elephant flows.To validate the network architecture,we implement it on a real network environment.Extensive simulation results show that EARS significantly improve the network throughput and reduces the average packet delay in comparison with baseline schemes(e.g.OSPF,ECMP).

A Game-Theoretic Approach to Elastic Control in Software-Defined Networking

Elastic control could balance the distributed control plane in Software-Defined Networking(SDN). Dynamic switch migration has been proposed to achieve it. However, existing schemes mainly focus on how to execute migration operation, but not why. This paper designs a decision-making mechanism based on zero-sum game theory to reelect a new controller as the master for migrated switches. It first chooses a switch for migration in the heavy controller which invites its neighbors as the game players to compete for the master role of this switch in the game-playing field(GPF) which is an occasional and loose domain for game-playing. Second, based on the concept of GPF, we design a decentralized strategy to play the game and determine which player as the final master. We implement it by extending the Open Flow protocol. Finally, numerical results demonstrate that our distributed strategy can approach elastic control plane with better performance.

Towards a Dynamic Controller Scheduling-Timing Problem in Software-Defined Networking

Controller vulnerabilities allow malicious actors to disrupt or hijack the Software-Defined Networking. Traditionally, it is static mappings between the control plane and data plane. Adversaries have plenty of time to exploit the controller's vulnerabilities and launch attacks wisely. We tend to believe that dynamically altering such static mappings is a promising approach to alleviate this issue, since a moving target is difficult to be compromised even by skilled adversaries. It is critical to determine the right time to conduct scheduling and to balance the overhead afforded and the security levels guaranteed. Little previous work has been done to investigate the economical time in dynamic-scheduling controllers. In this paper, we take the first step to both theoretically and experimentally study the scheduling-timing problem in dynamic control plane. We model this problem as a renewal reward process and propose an optimal algorithm in deciding the right time to schedule with the objective of minimizing the long-term loss rate. In our experiments, simulations based on real network attack datasets are conducted and we demonstrate that our proposed algorithm outperforms given scheduling schemes.

TBDDoSA-MD:Trust-Based DDoS Misbehave Detection Approach in Software-defined Vehicular Network(SDVN)

Reliable vehicles are essential in vehicular networks for effective communication.Since vehicles in the network are dynamic,even a short span of misbehavior by a vehicle can disrupt the whole network which may lead to catastrophic consequences.In this paper,a Trust-Based Distributed DoS Misbehave Detection Approach(TBDDoSA-MD)is proposed to secure the Software-Defined Vehicular Network(SDVN).A malicious vehicle in this network performs DDoS misbehavior by attacking other vehicles in its neighborhood.It uses the jamming technique by sending unnecessary signals in the network,as a result,the network performance degrades.Attacked vehicles in that network will no longer meet the service requests from other vehicles.Therefore,in this paper,we proposed an approach to detect the DDoS misbehavior by using the trust values of the vehicles.Trust values are calculated based on direct trust and recommendations(indirect trust).These trust values help to decide whether a vehicle is legitimate or malicious.We simply discard the messages from malicious vehicles whereas the authenticity of the messages from legitimate vehicles is checked further before taking any action based on those messages.The performance of TBDDoSA-MD is evaluated in the Veins hybrid simulator,which uses OMNeT++and Simulation of Urban Mobility(SUMO).We compared the performance of TBDDoSA-MD with the recently proposed Trust-Based Framework(TBF)scheme using the following performance parameters such as detection accuracy,packet delivery ratio,detection time,and energy consumption.Simulation results show that the proposed work has a high detection accuracy of more than 90%while keeping the detection time as low as 30 s.

Real-Time Timing Channel Detection in a Software-Defined Networking Virtual Environment

Despite extensive research, timing channels (TCs) are still known as a principal category of threats that aim to leak and transmit information by perturbing the timing or ordering of events. Existing TC detection approaches use either signature-based approaches to detect known TCs or anomaly-based approach by modeling the legitimate network traffic in order to detect unknown TCs. Un-fortunately, in a software-defined networking (SDN) environment, most existing TC detection approaches would fail due to factors such as volatile network traffic, imprecise timekeeping mechanisms, and dynamic network topology. Furthermore, stealthy TCs can be designed to mimic the legitimate traffic pattern and thus evade anomalous TC detection. In this paper, we overcome the above challenges by presenting a novel framework that harnesses the advantages of elastic re-sources in the cloud. In particular, our framework dynamically configures SDN to enable/disable differential analysis against outbound network flows of different virtual machines (VMs). Our framework is tightly coupled with a new metric that first decomposes the timing data of network flows into a number of using the discrete wavelet-based multi-resolution transform (DWMT). It then applies the Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD) to measure the variance among flow pairs. The appealing feature of our approach is that, compared with the existing anomaly detection approaches, it can detect most existing and some new stealthy TCs without legitimate traffic for modeling, even with the presence of noise and imprecise timekeeping mechanism in an SDN virtual environment. We implement our framework as a prototype system, OBSERVER, which can be dynamically deployed in an SDN environment. Empirical evaluation shows that our approach can efficiently detect TCs with a higher detection rate, lower latency, and negligible performance overhead compared to existing approaches.

A Novel Features Prioritization Mechanism for Controllers in Software-Defined Networking

The controller in software-defined networking(SDN)acts as strategic point of control for the underlying network.Multiple controllers are available,and every single controller retains a number of features such as the OpenFlow version,clustering,modularity,platform,and partnership support,etc.They are regarded as vital when making a selection among a set of controllers.As such,the selection of the controller becomes a multi-criteria decision making(MCDM)problem with several features.Hence,an increase in this number will increase the computational complexity of the controller selection process.Previously,the selection of controllers based on features has been studied by the researchers.However,the prioritization of features has gotten less attention.Moreover,several features increase the computational complexity of the selection process.In this paper,we propose a mathematical modeling for feature prioritization with analytical network process(ANP)bridge model for SDN controllers.The results indicate that a prioritized features model lead to a reduction in the computational complexity of the selection of SDN controller.In addition,our model generates prioritized features for SDN controllers.

Software-Defined Optical Data Centre Networks

Based on the analysis of data centre(DC) traffic pattern, we introduced a holistic software-defined optical DC solution. Architecture-on-Demand based hybrid optical switched(OPS/OCS) data centre network(DCN) fabric is introduced, which is able to realise different inter-and intra-cluster configurations and dynamically support diverse traffic in the DC. The optical DCN is controlled and managed by a software-defined networking(SDN) enabled control plane to achieve high programmability. Moreover, virtual data centre(VDC) composition is developed as an application of such softwaredefined optical DC to create VDC slices for different tenants.