Vers une gestion efficace des réseaux distribués SDN utilisant la technologie Blockchain – TIC-TAC-SDN

To achieve the project objectives that have been introduced in Section I.2, two scientific Work Packages (WP1 & WP2) have been defined, as summarized below:

WP1 – Formal definition of the trade-off problem
Before investigating and proposing any new consensus protocol, it is needed to methodologically and thoroughly study and understand how a given blockchain technology (or family of technologies) impacts on the end-to-end dSDN application performance in order to accurately formalize the trade-off optimization problem addressed in TIC-TAC-SDN. To achieve this, two tasks are defined in WP1, namely: (i) Task 1.1 that aims to develop appropriate Design of Experiments (DoE) in order to identify influencing parameters and interactions considering the architecture as a whole (i.e., considering different types of blockchain technologies/consensus protocols, network topologies, App settings, etc.); and (ii) Task 1.2 that aims to accurately formalize the fitness (optimization) function underpinning the trade-off challenge. To put it another way, a set of blockchain technologies are considered as “black-box” models in T1.1, while T1.2 focuses on studying – for one or a subset of blockchain technologies – the underlying consensus protocol in “white-box” fashion in order to accurately formalize it, which will further help us to formalize the trade-off optimization function. These two tasks are further detailed below.

WP2 – Formal design of a new adaptive consensus protocol:
At this stage, the trade-off optimization problem is formalized, research assumptions RA1 and RA2 verified, and the blockchain-based dSDN platform is available for the coming experiment in WP2. The next step consists now to investigate, formalize, design, implement and verify innovative and smart solutions that enable the dSDN architecture to self-adapt depending on the network conditions and application-specific needs. This corresponds to the “intelligence” that is going to be embedded into the cybernetics’ reconfiguration component. To achieve this, two tasks are defined, namely Task 2.1 that aims to formally design, implement, verify and evaluate a new type of consensus protocol that has the ability to self-adapt, in a real-time and continuous fashion, in order to best meet the fitness optimization function formalized in T1.2; and (ii) Task 2.2 that aims to improve the initial version of the proposed consensus protocol with predictive analytics capabilities. In T2.2, TIC-TAC-SDN aims to explore and develop algorithms to continuously monitor/measure the system convergence time (via South-bound APIs), while taking into consideration network manager needs/expectations (via North-bound APIs) in the view to on-line optimize the fitness function. The goal is to move the towards the co-called Intelligence Defined Network (IDN) paradigm, which aims to apply ML to automatically learn and improve from experience to anticipate network-behavioural patterns/needs.

The first scientific contribution of project is related to the work done by the PI with the recruited MSc student, Matthieu Renard. It gave rise to the following outcome so far
- 1 journal article submitted to Expert Systems with Applications (IF: 8.66), which is now at the 3rd round of review (waiting for result). The submitted article, along with the feedback from reviewers are attached at the end of this document;
- 1 decision-making tool made publicly available online has been released at the following URL: credodlt.sylvainkubler.fr. This tool, which is called CREDO-DLT standing for «multiCRiteria-basEd ranking Of Distributed Ledger Technology platforms« is developed to help decision-maker to select the most suitable DLT platform alternative (i.e., that best suits their needs and requirements). A use case scenario in the context of energy communities is developed in the article to show the practicality of CREDO-DLT (cf., manuscript attached to the report).

After this first contribution, the goal is to start specifying the self-adaptive consensus protocol with the PhD student

- 1 journal article submitted to Expert Systems with Applications (IF: 8.66), which is now at the 3rd round of review (waiting for result). The submitted article, along with the feedback from reviewers are attached at the end of this document;