2022/08/03 by Anichur Rahman, Rahman, Anichur, Antonio Montieri +13
Computer Science · #Blockchain Technology Applications and Security #C.2.3 #C.2.4 #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #IoT and Edge/Fog Computing #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) #Software-Defined Networks and 5G
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2208.02177
openalex publication_date 2022/08/03 · openalex created_date 2022/10/02 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Blockchain (BC) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) are leading technologies which have recently found applications in several network-related scenarios and have consequently experienced a growing interest in the research community. Indeed, current networks connect a massive number of objects over the Internet and in this complex scenario, to ensure security, privacy, confidentiality, and programmability, the utilization of BC and SDN have been successfully proposed. In this work, we provide a comprehensive survey regarding these two recent research trends and review the related state-of-the-art literature. We first describe the main features of each technology and discuss their most common and used variants. Furthermore, we envision the integration of such technologies to jointly take advantage of these latter efficiently. Indeed, we consider their group-wise utilization -- named BC-SDN -- based on the need for stronger security and privacy. Additionally, we cover the application fields of these technologies both individually and combined. Finally, we discuss the open issues of reviewed research and describe potential directions for future avenues regarding the integration of BC and SDN. To summarize, the contribution of the present survey spans from an overview of the literature background on BC and SDN to the discussion of the benefits and limitations of BC-SDN integration in different fields, which also raises open challenges and possible future avenues examined herein. To the best of our knowledge, compared to existing surveys, this is the first work that analyzes the aforementioned aspects in light of a broad BC-SDN integration, with a specific focus on security and privacy issues in actual utilization scenarios.