The ever-increasing number of network-capable devices places a massive burden on modern networks. Communication infrastructure should provide quality-of-service essentials in terms of high-bandwidth capacity, scalability, resiliency, and security. Programmable networks are viewed as the prevailing method of encountering the challenges introduced by the accelerated expansion. The ability of software-defined networking (SDN) to separate the control plane from the data plane and enable the programmability of the network creates new ways to architect the network. The centralization of control logic introduces complexities in large-scale, distributed networks such as performance bottlenecks and reliability. Distributed SDN controllers have been proposed to overcome the performance concerns. The lack of a communication standard among distributed controllers, referred to as the East/West interface, presents a challenge in the adoption of SDN in large-scale, distributed networks. In this paper, we propose Distributed SDN control plane Framework (DSF) - a framework for the East/West interface for heterogeneous, distributed SDN controllers to synchronize topologies using a standardized data-centric real-time publish/subscribe paradigm known as the Data Distribution Service (DDS). Distributed control plane architectures are proposed using DSF: flat, hierarchical, and T-model. The DSF interface is implemented on multiple SDN control plane platforms to evaluate performance: Floodlight and Open Network Operating System (ONOS) controllers. Test cases with different configurations are designed for performance evaluation of the proposed interface in homogeneous and heterogeneous SDN control planes. In addition, a performance comparison is presented of DSF-based ONOS controllers versus Atomix-based ONOS cluster solutions.

Traffic management challenges in peak seasons for popular destinations such as Madinah city have accelerated the need for and introduction of autonomous vehicles and Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) to assist in communication and alleviation of traffic congestions. The primary goal of this study is to evaluate the performance of communication routing protocols in VANETs between autonomous and human-driven vehicles in Madinah city in varying traffic conditions. A simulation of assorted traffic distributions and densities were modeled in an extracted map of Madinah city and then tested in two application scenarios with three ad hoc routing protocols using a combination of traffic and network simulation tools working in tandem. The results measured for the average trip time show that opting for a fully autonomous vehicle scenario reduces the trip time of vehicles by approximately 7.1% in high traffic densities and that the reactive ad hoc routing protocols induce the least delay for network packets to reach neighboring VANET vehicles. From these observations, it can be asserted that autonomous vehicles provide a significant reduction in travel time and that either of the two reactive ad hoc routing protocols could be implemented for the VANET implementation in Madinah city. Furthermore, we perform an ANOVA test to examine the effects of the factors that are considered in our study on the variation of the results.

Internet-of-Things is used in numerous applications including industrial, military systems and the platform like any other on the internet is vulnerable to security threats. However, due to the nature of the devices used, conventional security methods can incur an overhead and may obstruct the mission of the application due to resource constraints of the devices involved. To alleviate this problem, lightweight cryptographic algorithms have been proposed. Development and implementation of such algorithms continue to move forward; however, it remains a challenge to find suitable algorithms that match the specific needs of the IoT application implementer. In this paper, lightweight cryptography algorithms are categorized, and a few are chosen to be simulated and compared using metrics relevant to an Internet-of-Things environment.

Medium access control (MAC) protocols in ad hoc networks have evolved from single-channel independent transmission mechanisms to multi-channel concurrent mechanisms to efficiently manage the demands placed on modern networks. The primary aim of this study is to compare the performance of popular multi-channel MAC (MMAC) protocols under saturated network traffic conditions and propose improvements to the protocols under these conditions. A novel, dynamically adaptive MMAC protocol was devised to take advantage of the performance capabilities of the evaluated protocols in changing wireless ad hoc network conditions. A simulation of the familiar MAC protocols was developed based on a validated simulation of the IEEE 802.11 standard. Further, the behaviors and performances of these protocols are compared against the proposed MMAC protocols with a varying number of ad hoc stations and concurrent wireless channels in terms of throughput, Jain’s fairness index, and channel access delay. The results show that the proposed MMAC protocol, labeled E-SA-MMAC, outperforms the existing protocols in throughput by up to 11.9% under a constrained number of channels and in channel access delays by up to 18.3%. It can be asserted from these observations that the proposed approach provides performance benefits against its peers under saturated traffic conditions and other factors, such as the number of available wireless channels, and is suitable for dynamic ad hoc network deployments.