Hybrid Blockchain Software Defined Network Architecture for Secure and Energy Efficient Iot Routing

The integration of Internet of Things (IoT) devices with Software-Defined Networks (SDN) present significant challenges in security, trust management and energy efficiency.Traditional blockchain-integrated protocols suffer from high computational overhead and poor scalability under malicious attacks.This paper proposes Hybrid Blockchain-based Secure SDN-IoT Routing Framework (HB-SDN-IoT), a novel hybrid blockchain based secure routing framework that combines centralized SDN control with decentralized blockchain trust mechanism.The framework employs a dual-layer blockchain architecture using lightweight Proof-of-Authority (POS) for intra cluster operations and Proof-of-Work (PoW) for inter-controller communications.An energy-aware clustering algorithm dynamically selects cluster heads based on trust metrics and residual energy.Comprehensive MATLAB simulations demonstrate that HB-SDN-IoT achieves 23% energy reduction, 96.8% packet delivery ratio and 93.6% trust accuracy while maintaining robust security against Sybil and black hole attacks compared to existing protocols including AODV, DSDV and blockchain based alternatives.The proposed architecture addresses scalability and real-time responsiveness challenges while significantly improving data integrity, routing robustness, and energy efficiency, offering a promising paradigm for secure, intelligent IoT communications in heterogeneous and adversarial network environments.