Bi-channel hybrid GAN attention based anomaly detection system for multi-domain SDN environment

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a strategy that leads the network via software by separating its control plane from the underlying forwarding plane. In support of a global digital network, multi-domain SDN architecture emerges as a viable solution. However, the complex and ever-evolving nature of network threats in a multi-domain environment presents a significant security challenge for controllers in detecting abnormalities. Moreover, multi-domain anomaly detection poses a daunting problem due to the need to process vast amounts of data from diverse domains. Deep learning models have gained popularity for extracting high-level feature representations from massive datasets. In this work, a novel deep neural network architecture, supervised learning based LD-BiHGA (Low Dimensional Bi-channel Hybrid GAN Attention) system is designed to learn class-specific features for accurate anomaly detection. Two asymmetric GANs are employed for learning the normal and abnormal network flows separately. Then, to extract more relevant features, a bi-channel attention mechanism is added. This is the first study to introduce an innovative hybrid architecture that merges bi-channel hybrid GANs with attention models for the purpose of anomaly detection in a multi-domain SDN environment that effectively handles real-time unbalanced data. The suggested architecture demonstrates its effectiveness on three benchmark datasets, achieving an average accuracy improvement of 7.225% on balanced datasets and 3.335% on imbalanced datasets compared to previous intrusion detection system (IDS) architectures in the literature.