A Systematic Review of Machine-Learning-Based Detection of DDoS Attacks in Software-Defined Networks

Surendren Ganeshan, R Kanesaraj Ramasamy

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has emerged as a fundamental architecture for future Internet systems by enabling centralized control, programmability, and fine-grained traffic management. However, the logical centralization of the SDN control plane also introduces critical vulnerabilities, particularly to Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks that can severely disrupt network availability and performance. To address these challenges, machine-learning (ML) techniques have been increasingly adopted to enable intelligent, adaptive, and data-driven DDoS detection mechanisms within SDN environments. This study presents a PRISMA-guided systematic literature review of recent ML-based approaches for DDoS detection in SDN-based networks. A comprehensive search of IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, ScienceDirect, and Google Scholar identified 38 primary studies published between 2021 and 2025. The selected studies were systematically analyzed to examine learning paradigms, experimental environments, evaluation metrics, datasets, and emerging architectural trends. The synthesis reveals that while single machine-learning classifiers remain dominant in the literature, hybrid and ensemble-based approaches are increasingly adopted to improve detection robustness under dynamic and high-volume traffic conditions. Experimental evaluations are predominantly conducted using SDN emulation platforms such as Mininet integrated with controllers, including Ryu and OpenDaylight, with performance commonly measured using accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score, alongside emerging system-level metrics such as detection latency and controller resource utilization. Public datasets, including CICIDS2017, CICDDoS2019, and InSDN, are widely used, although a significant portion of studies rely on custom SDN-generated datasets to capture control-plane-specific behaviors. Despite notable advances in detection accuracy, several challenges persist, including limited generalization to low-rate and unknown attacks, dependency on synthetic traffic, and insufficient validation under real-time operational conditions. Based on the synthesized findings, this review highlights key research directions toward intelligent, scalable, and resilient DDoS defense mechanisms for future Internet architectures, emphasizing adaptive learning, lightweight deployment, and integration with programmable networking infrastructures.