A software-defined architecture for control of IoT cyberphysical systems

Abstract

Based on software-defined principles, we propose a holistic architecture for Cyberphysical Systems (CPS) and Internet of Things (IoT) applications, and highlight the merits pertaining to scalability, flexibility, robustness, interoperability, and cyber security. Our design especially capitalizes on the computational units possessed by smart agents, which may be utilized for decentralized control and in-network data processing. We characterize the data flow, communication flow, and control flow that assimilate a set of components such as sensors, actuators, controllers, and coordinators in a systemic programmable fashion. We specifically aim for distributed and decentralized decision-making by spreading the control over several hierarchical layers. In addition, we propose a middleware layer to encapsulate units and services for time-critical operations in highly dynamic environments. We further enlist a multitude of vulnerabilities to cyberattacks, and integrate softwaredefined solutions for enabling resilience, detection and recovery. In this purview, several controllers cooperate to identify and respond to security threats and abnormal situations in a self-adjusting manner. Last, we illustrate numerical simulations in support of the virtues of a software-defined design for CPS and IoT.

Blockchain Based Solutions to Mitigate Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks in the Internet of Things (IoT): A Survey

“…As mentioned earlier, there are very few works that present a combined architecture including SDIoT [ 78 , 79 , 80 , 81 , 82 ] and SDIoT-Edge frameworks [ 83 , 84 ] suggested for effective management, increased scalability and interoperability. However, we note that (to the best of our knowledge) there are no works that study the heterogeneous service architecture that combines SDIoT-Edge with blockchain.…”

“…The increased number of connected devices poses several challenges e.g., to effectively handle the enormous amounts of data [ 62 , 63 ], interoperability among various hardware and software platforms [ 64 , 65 ], challenges related to Big data management, privacy and provenance [ 66 ], mobility management and handover [ 67 , 68 , 69 ], and privacy and security challenges [ 70 , 71 ]. We note that there are various efforts from the research community in order to improve the performance and scalability of the IoT netwroks e.g., the use of edge computing to perform resource-intensive tasks [ 72 , 73 , 74 ], the use of SDN for flexible management and programmability [ 75 , 76 ] including flexible network programmability [ 77 , 78 ] that introduced a new combination of Software-Defined Internet of Things (SDIoT) architecture for an effective management [ 78 , 79 , 80 , 81 , 82 ]; similarly, the Software-Defined Internet of Things and Edge (SDIoT-Edge) frameworks [ 83 , 84 ] were suggested for increased scalability and interoperability [ 82 ].…”

Internet of Things architecture challenges: A systematic review

“…Darabseh and Freris 122 proposed an architecture for cyber‐physical systems. This architecture consists of physical nodes, cyber nodes such as sensors and actuators, coordinators, controllers, and middleware.…”

“…Darabseh and Freris 122 provided a security requirement analysis for cyber‐physical systems. In this paper backup, restore and replication mechanisms are used to increase the availability.…”

Increasing fault tolerance of data plane on the internet of things using the software-defined networks

“…Therefore, traditional network technologies cannot handle IoT requirements efficiently to provide scalability, seamlessly, and cost-effectively ( Bera, Misra & Vasilakos, 2017 ; Davoli et al, 2018 ; Zhang et al, 2018 ; Tomovic et al, 2016 ). Because of the wide variety of IoT and its organizational complexity, the SDN-based IoT architecture has been proposed for effective management ( Darabseh & Freris, 2017 ; Jararweh et al, 2018 ; Haque et al, 2019 ; Alam et al, 2019 ).…”