Detecting Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks in Software-Defined Internet of Things (SD-IoT) networks is challenging due to vulnerabilities in single-controller architectures, the limitations of the OpenFlow protocol, evolving DDoS strategies, and resource constraints. This research proposes a multi-layered security framework that integrates deception-based security, cloud-integrated machine learning (ML), a new hierarchically distributed multi-controller (HDMC) architecture, P4-enabled real-time traffic monitoring, and adaptive mitigation. The framework includes dynamic time-based windowing for enhanced detection, a decoy network to divert attackers, and a cloud-based multi-task ML model (MT-EDD) for attack classification. It also features a synchronized multi-control design for secure communication and coordinated actions among multiple controllers and a dynamic monitoring algorithm for real-time …