Blockchain-based secure distributed control for software defined optical networking

Software defined optical networking (SDON) is a critical technology for the next generation network with the advantages of programmable control and etc. As one of the key issues of SDON, the security of control plane has also received extensive attention, especially in certain network scenarios with high security requirement. Due to the existence of vulnerabilities and heavy overhead, the existing firewalls and distributed control technologies cannot solve the control plane security problem well. In this paper, we propose a distributed control architecture for SDON using the blockchain technique (BlockCtrl). The proposed BlockCtrl model introduces the advantages of blockchain into SDON to achieve a high-efficiency fault tolerant control. We have evaluated the performance of our proposed architecture and compared it to the existing models with respect to various metrics including processing rate, recovery latency and etc. The numerical results show that the BlockCtrl is capable of attacks detection and fault tolerant control in SDON with high performance on resource utilization and service correlation.