Implementation of Blockchain-Assisted Source Routing for Traffic Management in Software-Defined Networks

The control and infrastructure layers are split into Software-Defined Networks (SDNs). With the control and infrastructure planes split, new network applications may be developed with more simplicity and greater independence. On the other hand, the disadvantages of SDN create a slew of questions. In large-scale networks, such as Wide Area Networks (WANs) covering huge areas, more propagation delays substantially contribute to network convergence time. In addition, traditional SDN restricts network design flexibility due to the influence of controller location on network performance in large-scale networks. SDN-based source routing (SR) has emerged as a viable solution to the issues above, where the packet header field is used to specify a packet's route. This study presents an SR-based End-to-End (E2E) traffic management framework called SoRBlock. In SoRBlock, inter-domain routing uses blockchain technology, while intra-domain routing relies on the SR technique in SDNs. The simulation results show that the proposed SR-based SoRBlock framework outperforms the traditional hierarchical routing approach, HRA, in SDN networks by lowering path setup time (PST) and the number of controller messages. While the same (i.e., identical origin and target) service requests were used for all runs in the simulations, the proposed SoRBlock architecture presents almost three times less total PST between 45ms and 65ms than the HRA method between 130ms and 200ms due to the HRA approach's increased node-controller and controller-controller latencies. On the other hand, SoRBlock shows two times less PST ([75ms – 90ms]) than HRA ([150ms – 175ms]) when different service requests (i.e., different origin and target) were used. Concerning Controller Messages Processed (CMP), the HRA deals nearly 50% more controller messages between 7 and 15 than the SoRBlock between 3 and 10 when the number of domains varies, while the CMP in the SoRBlock scheme ([10 - 17]) approaches that in the HRA framework ([15 - 20]) regarding the ratio while the count of nodes rises in domains.