The rapid merge of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), and Blockchain technologies atop the fifth generation and beyond (B5G) communication networks is envisioned to promote Next Generation Networks (NGNs), which aim for a large-scale, high-dimensional, intelligent, decentralized, and autonomous network infrastructure for complex and heterogeneous IoT ecosystems. To develop such an ecosystem, highly connected devices and user-defined applications bring serious connectivity, security, scalability, and interoperability issues to fragmented and isolated domain-specific autonomous networks. This article presents a Secure Interconnected Autonomous System Architecture (SIASA), which combines Software Defined Network (SDN) with the hierarchical blockchain federation to improve dynamicity, scalability, and interoperability for multi-domain IoT networks. Through softwarization and virtualization provided by network slicing (NS), a logic IoT ecosystem consists of multiple isolated physical networks as autonomous systems (ASs) that rely on heterogeneous blockchains to provide decentralization and security for each domain. SIASA adopts a hierarchical network of federated blockchains for inter-blockchain communication. In addition, an intelligent SDN-enabled Blockchain gateway framework is proposed to support scalable and secure transactions and data-sharing operations among interconnected autonomous systems. The experimental results based on a preliminary proof-of-concept prototype verify the feasibility of the proposed SIASA architecture in terms of end-to-end latency and throughput in the inter-blockchain scene.

中文翻译：

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适用于多域物联网生态系统的安全互连自治系统架构


人工智能 (AI)、物联网 (IoT) 和区块链技术在第五代及以上 (B5G) 通信网络上的快速融合预计将促进下一代网络 (NGN)，其目标是实现大规模、用于复杂异构物联网生态系统的高维、智能、去中心化和自治的网络基础设施。为了开发这样的生态系统，高度连接的设备和用户定义的应用程序给分散和孤立的特定域自治网络带来了严重的连接性、安全性、可扩展性和互操作性问题。本文提出了一种安全互连自治系统架构 (SIASA)，它将软件定义网络 (SDN) 与分层区块链联盟相结合，以提高多域物联网网络的动态性、可扩展性和互操作性。通过网络切片（NS）提供的软件化和虚拟化，逻辑物联网生态系统由多个独立的物理网络组成，作为自治系统（AS），依赖异构区块链为每个域提供去中心化和安全性。 SIASA 采用联邦区块链的分层网络进行区块链间通信。此外，还提出了一种支持 SDN 的智能区块链网关框架，以支持互连自治系统之间的可扩展且安全的交易和数据共享操作。基于初步概念验证原型的实验结果验证了所提出的SIASA架构在跨链场景中端到端延迟和吞吐量方面的可行性。