Muthanna Journal of Engineering and Technology
Volume (14), Issue (4), Year (2026), Pages (1-13)
DOI:10.52113/3/eng/mjet/2026-14-04-/1-13
Research Article By:
Fahad N. Nife
Corresponding author E-mail: fahad.naim@mu.edu.iq
ABSTRACT
In Multi-principal Software-Defined Networks (SDNs), where multiple heterogeneous principals such as IoT devices, applications and administrators can issue potentially conflicting flow rules, decisions on which policy expression to enforce is guided by a hierarchy. Existing frameworks — most prominently Hierarchical Flow Tables (HFT) — disambiguate similarly conflicting characterizations using static, trust-agnostic operators, giving equal authority to every principal regardless of runtime behavioral integrity and allowing a single compromised IoT device to override an otherwise legitimate administrator policy. This paper proposes TDCR-SDN, a Trust-Driven Dynamic Conflict Resolution framework that builds upon the existing Policy-tree semantics of HFT by applying trust-parameterized conflict-resolution operators (⊕τ), in which each conflict outcome is weighted based on the dynamic trust score associated with the issuing principal. An example architecture uses a Trust Scoring Module (TSM) to repeatedly assess per-principal behavioral metrics and condition policy recompilation on the specific crossing of trust boundaries when policy on the RYU 4.34 controller is evoked. Evaluation across six experiments on a five-switch Mininet testbed against the HFT baseline reveals 21.8 percentage-point improvements in conflict resolution accuracy, ten-fold recovery throughput under UDP-flood DoS attack, and an 87% relative improvement in guaranteed minimum bandwidth preservation, at reasonable (33%) policy compilation overhead.
Keywords:
Hierarchical Flow Tables; IoT Security; Policy Conflict Resolution; Software-Defined Networking; Trust Management.