Secure Software-Defined Networking Communication Systems for Smart Cities: Current Status, Challenges, and Trends

Smart city is a transformative and progressive vision that aims to revolutionize infrastructure systems and public services in an urban area with modern information technologies. Its ultimate goal is to greatly improve the livability Quality of Service (QoS) of its citizens and to optimize the utilization of its assets and natural resources sustainably. One of the key technical attributes in smart cities is to deploy a large number of sensors to collect data to enable real-time and intelligent decisions for various city functions and citizen needs. Many of the data have strict security requirements as they are either private to citizens or sensitive to critical infrastructures. As a result, how to securely and efficiently deliver and process the dramatically increasing volume of data becomes one of the grand challenges in materializing the smart city vision. In recent years, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has emerged as a leading communication infrastructure candidate for smart cities. While many efforts have existed to research, prototype, and even deploy SDN on a small scale for some smart city applications, there is still a lack of cohesive understanding about SDN’s impact on the secure communication need of smart cities. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey of the core functionality of SDN from the perspective of secure communication infrastructure at different scales. A specific focus is put on the security threats and challenges in accordance with SDN plane-based architectures for various smart city-enabled applications. We further systematically categorize the state-of-art solutions and proposals to apply SDN to support typical smart city applications, such as transportation, health, and energy applications. Lastly, we cast a holistic view of future research trends.