  The rapid increase of diverse Internet of things (IoT) services and devices
has raised numerous challenges in terms of connectivity, computation, and
security, which networks must face in order to provide satisfactory support.
This has led to networks evolving into heterogeneous IoT networking
infrastructures characterized by multiple access technologies and mobile edge
computing (MEC) capabilities. The heterogeneity of the networks, devices, and
services introduces serious vulnerabilities to security attacks, especially
distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which exploit massive IoT devices
to exhaust both network and victim resources. As such, this study proposes
MECshield, a localized DDoS prevention framework leveraging MEC power to deploy
multiple smart filters at the edge of relevant attack-source/destination
networks. The cooperation among the smart filters is supervised by a central
controller. The central controller localizes each smart filter by feeding
appropriate training parameters into its self-organizing map (SOM) component,
based on the attacking behavior. The performance of the MECshield framework is
verified using three typical IoT traffic scenarios. The numerical results
reveal that MECshield outperforms existing solutions.
