Threat-Aware Data Transmission in Software-Defined Networks

Characterized by flexible network management and control, Software-Defined Networks (SDN) has emerged as a promising networking paradigm in recent years. With data transmission paths centrally controlled in SDN, high efficiency and quality of data transmission can be reasonably expected. However, these benefits could easily be compromised, if cyber threats targeted the data transmission paths, particularly the transmitting nodes, cannot be well mitigated or tolerated. To address this challenging issue, we in this paper propose a Threat-aware Data Transmission (TDT) mechanism for SDN. Prior to this, first we establish a mathematical data transmission model for SDN, and then we design a threat intelligence based cyber threat evaluation approach for transmitting nodes. Numerical results demonstrate the outperformance of the proposed scheme over existing studies.