Internet of Things (IoT) is a disruptive technology in many aspects of our society, ranging from communications to financial transactions to national security (e.g., Internet of Battlefield / Military Things), and so on. There are long-standing challenges in IoT, such as security, comparability, energy consumption, and heterogeneity of devices. Security and energy aspects play important roles in data transmission across IoT and edge networks, due to limited energy and computing (e.g., processing and storage) resources of networked devices. Whether malicious or accidental, interference with data in an IoT network potentially has real-world consequences. In this article, we explore the potential of integrating blockchain and software-defined networking (SDN) in mitigating some of the challenges. Specifically, we propose a secure and energy-efficient blockchain-enabled architecture of SDN controllers for IoT networks using a cluster structure with a new routing protocol. The architecture uses public and private blockchains for Peer to Peer (P2P) communication between IoT devices and SDN controllers, which eliminates Proof-of-Work (POW), as well as using an efficient authentication method with the distributed trust, making the blockchain suitable for resource-constrained IoT devices. The experimental results indicate that the routing protocol based on the cluster structure has higher throughput, lower delay, and lower energy consumption than EESCFD, SMSN, AODV, AOMDV, and DSDV routing protocols. In other words, our proposed architecture is demonstrated to outperform classic blockchain.

中文翻译：

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具有基于区块链的安全性的物联网网络的节能 SDN 控制器架构

物联网 (IoT) 是我们社会许多方面的颠覆性技术，从通信到金融交易再到国家安全（例如，战场互联网/军事物联网）等等。物联网存在长期挑战，例如安全性、可比性、能耗和设备的异构性。由于联网设备的能源和计算（例如处理和存储）资源有限，安全和能源方面在物联网和边缘网络的数据传输中发挥着重要作用。无论是恶意的还是意外的，对物联网网络中的数据的干扰都可能会产生现实世界的后果。在本文中，我们探讨了集成区块链和软件定义网络 (SDN) 在缓解一些挑战方面的潜力。具体来说，我们使用具有新路由协议的集群结构为物联网网络提出了一种安全且节能的区块链支持架构。该架构使用公共和私有区块链进行物联网设备和 SDN 控制器之间的点对点 (P2P) 通信，从而消除工作量证明 (POW)，并使用具有分布式信任的高效身份验证方法，使区块链适合适用于资源受限的物联网设备。实验结果表明，基于集群结构的路由协议比EESCFD、SMSN、AODV、AOMDV和DSDV路由协议具有更高的吞吐量、更低的延迟和更低的能耗。换句话说，我们提出的架构被证明优于经典区块链。