Blockchain-SDN-Based Energy-Aware and Distributed Secure Architecture for IoT in Smart Cities

Insecure and portable devices in the smart city’s Internet of Things (IoT) network are increasing at an incredible rate. Various distributed and centralized platforms against cyber attacks have been implemented in recent years, but these platforms are inefficient due to their constrained levels of storage, high energy consumption, the central point of failure, underutilized resources, high latency, etc. In addition, the current architecture confronts the problems of scalability, flexibility, complexity, monitoring, managing and collecting of IoT data, and defend against cyber threats. To address these issues, the authors present a distributed and decentralized blockchain-software-defined networking (SDN)-based energy-aware architecture for IoT in smart cities. Thus, SDN is continuously observing, controlling, and managing IoT devices activities and detects possible attacks in the network; blockchain provides adequate security and privacy against cyber attacks, and reduces the central point of failure issues; network function virtualization (NFV) is used to saving energy, load balancing, as well as increasing the lifetime of the entire network. Also, we introduce a cluster head selection (CHS) algorithm to reduce the energy consumption in the presented model. Finally, we analyze the performance using various parameters (e.g., throughput, response time, gas consumption, and communication overhead) and demonstrate the result that provides higher throughput, lower response time, and lower gas consumption than existing works for smart cities.