Joint energy efficiency and network optimization for integrated blockchain-SDN-based internet of things networks

The Internet of Things (IoT) networks are poised to play a critical role in providing ultra-low latency and high bandwidth communications in various real-world IoT scenarios. Assuring end-to-end secure, energy-aware, reliable, real-time IoT communication is hard due to the heterogeneity and transient behavior of IoT networks. Additionally, the lack of integrated approaches to efficiently schedule IoT tasks and holistically offload computing resources, and computational limits in IoT systems to achieve effective resource utilization. This paper makes three contributions to research on overcoming these problems in the context of distributed IoT systems that use the Software Defined Networking (SDN) programmable control plane in symbiosis with blockchain to benefit from the dispersed or decentralized, and efficient environment of distributed IoT transactions over Wide Area Networks (WANs). First, it introduces a Blockchain-SDN architectural component to reinforce flexibility and trustworthiness and improve the Quality of Service (QoS) of IoT networks. Second, it describes the design of an IoT-focused smart contract that implements the control logic to manage IoT data, detect and report suspected IoT nodes, and mitigate malicious traffic. Third, we introduce a novel consensus algorithm based on the Proof-of-Authority (PoA) to achieve agreements between blockchain-enabled IoT nodes, improve the reliability of IoT edge devices, and establish absolute trust among all smart IoT systems. Experimental results show that integrating SDN with blockchain outperforms traditional Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) algorithms, delivering up to 68% lower latency, 87% higher transaction throughput, and 45% better energy savings.