Secure routing in internet of things using software defined networking and chaos theory

Abstract Secure data transmission in the Internet of Things (IoT) is a necessity, and the current secure routing paradigms, including trust-based distributed protocols and traditional RPL-based extensions, are usually characterized by high control overhead and high latency in dynamic environments because they cannot adapt to the frequent topology changes. In order to overcome these drawbacks, this paper presents a new secure routing architecture that combines Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and chaos theory. The process is in two stages: topology control and secure routing. First, SDN controller makes use of node mobility patterns and predicted link stability to pre-compute resilient clusters, which substantially lowers network reconfiguration frequency. Second, a lightweight chaotic encryption algorithm is presented, based on a dynamic initial condition based on the data payload itself in order to provide confidentiality at a low cost in terms of computational resources. The simulation outcomes prove that the suggested approach is better than the state-of-the-art protocols, as it enhances energy efficiency by about 23.7% and the ratio of packet delivery by 5.3%, which justifies its applicability to resource-constrained and dynamic IoT networks.