Abstract Smart device manufacturers rely on insights from smart home (SH) data to update their devices, and similarly, service providers use it for predictive maintenance. In terms of data security and privacy, combining distributed federated learning (FL) with blockchain technology is being considered to prevent single point failure and model poising attacks. However, adding blockchain to a FL environment can worsen blockchain's scaling issues and create regular service interruptions at SH. This article presents a scalable Blockchain‐based Privacy‐preserving Federated Learning (BPFL) architecture for an SH ecosystem that integrates blockchain and FL. BPFL can automate SHs' services and distribute machine learning (ML) operations to update IoT manufacturer models and scale service provider services. The architecture uses a local peer as a gateway to connect SHs to the blockchain network and safeguard user data, transactions, and ML operations. Blockchain facilitates ecosystem access management and learning. The Stanford Cars and an IoT dataset have been used as test bed experiments, taking into account the nature of data (i.e. images and numeric). The experiments show that ledger optimisation can boost scalability by 40–60% in BCN by reducing transaction overhead by 60%. Simultaneously, it increases learning capacity by 10% compared to baseline FL techniques.

The rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) introduces critical challenges in scalability, mobility, and security, particularly in large-scale deployments. While information-centric networking (ICN) addresses these by enhancing content mobility, multipath support, and edge-embedded caching with inherent security features, it faces limitations in handling large heterogeneous environments due to its in-network caching and content-based forwarding strategies. Software-defined networking (SDN) complements ICN by employing a centralized controller to intelligently orchestrate content caching and forwarding, yet struggles with the efficient allocation and acquisition of content across expansive IoT systems. In response to these challenges, we propose CIC-SIoT, a novel information-centric SDN (IC-SDN) solution, designed to optimize the ICN-IoT framework. Our solution incorporates specialized algorithms for controllers, consumers, producers, and ICN nodes. These algorithms improve content forwarding decisions by moving beyond the traditional reliance on the forwarding information base (FIB) and instead utilizing the pending interest table (PIT) to efficiently manage and distribute content. Validated through ndnSIM and MATLAB simulations, CIC-SIoT achieves substantial performance enhancements, including an 80% increase in throughput, a 34% reduction in latency, and a 25% savings in bandwidth. Additionally, it reduces packet loss by 67% and communication overhead by 66%, compared to existing solutions. These results underscore the framework’s ability to significantly improve the efficiency and scalability of content distribution in IoT environments, highlighting its robustness and adaptability in addressing the complex dynamics of modern networked systems.

Software-Defined Networking has become an integral technology for large scale networks that require dynamic flow management. It separates the control function from data plane devices and centralizes it in a domain controller. However, only a limited number of switches can be managed by a single and centralized controller which introduces challenges such as scalability, reliability, and availability. Distributed controller architecture resolves these issues but also introduces new challenges of uneven load and traffic management across domains. As real-world networks have redundant links, hence a significant challenge is to distribute traffic flows on multiple paths, within a domain, and across multiple independent domains. The selection of ingress and egress switches becomes even more problematic if the intermediate domain is non-cooperative. In this work, we propose a Dynamically Optimized and Load-balanced Path for Inter-domain (DOLPHIN) communication system, a customized solution for different SDN controllers. It provides control beyond the virtual switch elements in intra and inter-domain communication and extends the range of programmability to wireless devices, such as the Internet of Things or vehicular networks. Extensive simulation results show that the traffic load is distributed evenly on multiple links connecting different domains. We model data center communication and 5G vehicular network communication to show that, by load balancing the flow completion times of the different types of network traffic can be significantly improved.