The recent advancements in security approaches have significantly increased the ability to identify and mitigate any type of threat or attack in any network infrastructure, such as a software-defined network (SDN), and protect the internet security architecture against a variety of threats or attacks. Machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) are among the most popular techniques for preventing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on any kind of network. The objective of this systematic review is to identify, evaluate, and discuss new efforts on ML/DL-based DDoS attack detection strategies in SDN networks. To reach our objective, we conducted a systematic review in which we looked for publications that used ML/DL approaches to identify DDoS attacks in SDN networks between 2018 and the beginning of November 2022. To search the contemporary literature, we have extensively utilized a number of digital libraries (including IEEE, ACM, Springer, and other digital libraries) and one academic search engine (Google Scholar). We have analyzed the relevant studies and categorized the results of the SLR into five areas: (i) The different types of DDoS attack detection in ML/DL approaches; (ii) the methodologies, strengths, and weaknesses of existing ML/DL approaches for DDoS attacks detection; (iii) benchmarked datasets and classes of attacks in datasets used in the existing literature; (iv) the preprocessing strategies, hyperparameter values, experimental setups, and performance metrics used in the existing literature; and (v) current research gaps and promising future directions.
