Secure and reliable IoT networks using fog computing with software-defined networking and blockchain

Designing Internet of Things (IoT) applications faces many challenges including security, massive traffic, high availability, high reliability and energy constraints. Recent distributed computing paradigms, such as Fog and multi-access edge computing (MEC), software-defined networking (SDN), network virtualization and blockchain can be exploited in IoT networks, either combined or individually, to overcome the aforementioned challenges while maintaining system performance. In this paper, we present a framework for IoT that employs an edge computing layer of Fog nodes controlled and managed by an SDN network to achieve high reliability and availability for latency-sensitive IoT applications. The SDN network is equipped with distributed controllers and distributed resource constrained OpenFlow switches. Blockchain is used to ensure decentralization in a trustful manner. Additionally, a data offloading algorithm is developed to allocate various processing and computing tasks to the OpenFlow switches based on their current workload. Moreover, a traffic model is proposed to model and analyze the traffic indifferent parts of the network. The proposed algorithm is evaluated in simulation and in a testbed. Experimental results show that the proposed framework achieves higher efficiency in terms of latency and resource utilization. © 2019 MDPI AG. All rights reserved.