Network management schemes for IoT environment towards 6G: A comprehensive review

Usage of smart devices, expansion of Internet of Things (IoT) network, and its adoption in variety of applications grows exponentially day-by-day. It leads to various issues such as network privacy, security management, unreliable network management (NM) scheme, resource utilization, energy utilization, decentralization, transparency, and data interoperability. Development of the NM platform/framework for secure data dissemination in IoT networks is tedious due to heterogeneity and imbalanced IoT protocol stack. Recently, traditional network scheduling methods, Software Defined Networks (SDN), Network Function Virtualization (NFV), and hybrid approaches are widely used for managing the IoT network. But, most of these approaches are controlled by a centralized server, which may not be appropriate due to the heterogeneity of the IoT devices. Motivated from the aforementioned discussion, In this paper, we present a systematic survey on various NM schemes used to secure data dissemination for the IoT environment. We present a detailed taxonomy of all the existing NM schemes for IoT networks. Pros and cons of the traditional NM methods applicable for IoT environment are discussed in detail. The paper discusses a state-of-art survey on integrating blockchain (BC) technology in the existing IoT NM techniques. In this paper, our prime focus is to understand the potential of BC for enabling secured IoT management. Finally, a case study on BC implication for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) network using 6G is also discussed along with future directions.