Blockchain-Based Software-Defined Industrial Internet of Things: A Dueling Deep ${Q}$ -Learning Approach

With the developments of communication technologies and smart manufacturing, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has emerged. Software-defined networking (SDN), a promising paradigm shift, has provided a viable way to manage IIoT dynamically, called software-defined IIoT (SDIIoT). In SDIIoT, lots of data and flows are generated by industrial devices, where a physically distributed but logically centralized control plane is necessary. However, one of the most intractable problems is how to reach consensus among multiple controllers under complex industrial environments. In this paper, we propose a blockchain (BC)-based consensus protocol in SDIIoT, along with detailed consensus steps and theoretical analysis, where BC works as a trusted third party to collect and synchronize network-wide views between different SDN controllers. Specially, it is a permissioned BC. In order to improve the throughput of this BC-based SDIIoT, we jointly consider the trust features of BC nodes and controllers, as well as the computational capability of the BC system. Accordingly, we formulate view change, access selection, and computational resources allocation as a joint optimization problem. We describe this problem as a Markov decision process by defining state space, action space, and reward function. Due to the fact that it is difficult to solve this joint problem by traditional methods, we propose a novel dueling deep Q-learning approach. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.