Controller placement optimization in hierarchical distributed software defined vehicular networks

SummaryThe recent breakthroughs in the automobile industries and telecommunication technologies along with the exceptional multimodal mobility services brought focus on intelligent transportation system (ITS), of which vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) gain much more attention. The distinctive features of software‐defined networking (SDN) leverages the vehicular networks by its state of the centralized art having a comprehensive view of the network. Its potential to bring the flexibility, programmability and other extensive advancements to vehicular networks has set the stage for a novel networking paradigm termed as software‐defined vehicular networks (SDVNs). Many researchers have demonstrated the SDN‐based VANETs with the various configuration of the SDN components in VANET architecture. However, a compilation of the work on the SDN‐based VANET system as a whole, incorporating its architecture, use‐cases, and opportunities, is still inadequate. We start with the summary of the recent studies that exist on the SDVNs, followed by the comprehensive explanation of its components. Next, we present the taxonomy of SDVN based on the architecture modes, protocols, access technologies, and opportunities with trending technologies. Finally, we highlight the challenges, open research issues, and future research directions.

The dynamic nature of vehicular networks imposes a lot of challenges in multihop data transmission as links are vulnerable in their existence due to associated mobility of vehicles. Thus, packets frequently find it difficult to get through to the destination due to the limited lifetimes of links. The conventional broadcasting based vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) routing protocols struggle to accurately analyze the link dynamicity due to the unavailability of global information and inefficiencies in their route discovering schemes. However, with the recently emerged software defined vehicular network (SDVN) paradigm, link stability can be better scrutinized pertaining to the availability of global network information. Thus, in this paper, we introduce an optimization based novel packet routing scheme with a source routing based flow instantiation (FI) operation for SDVN. The routing framework closely analyzes the stability of links in selecting the routes and the problem is formulated as a minimum cost capacitated flow problem. Furthermore, an incremental packet allocation scheme is proposed to solve the routing problem in a less time complexity. The objective is to find multiple shortest paths which are collectively stable enough to deliver a given number of packets. The FI scheme efficiently delivers and caches flow information in the required nodes with a reduced extent of communication with the control plane. With the help of realistic simulation, we show that the proposed routing framework excels in terms of the performance over the existing routing schemes of both SDVN and conventional VANET.

A vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is a mobile ad hoc network composed of communication between vehicles, between vehicles and roadside units, and between vehicles and pedestrians, in order to achieve traffic safety and entertainment services. The design of the routing protocol is very important for the realization of the service function of VANET. Local optimum and network congestion problems are restraints of traditional geographic routing protocols for VANET. In this paper, a software-defined network (SDN) based unicast routing scheme in an urban traffic environment is proposed, which uses Dijkstra’s algorithm to find a global optimal anchor path. The RSU neighbor discovery protocol is proposed, through which each RSU can discover its neighbor RSUs, and then each RSU periodically sends ant packets to its neighbor RSUs, evaluates the communication connection quality of each street segment according to the statistical data of the ant packets received, and sends the evaluation value to the SDN server in time. The SDN server has the connection quality evaluation values of all street segments in the global scope, from which an optimal anchor path can be calculated. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme has better packet delivery ratio than other related schemes.

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANET) have emerged as a viable solution for the network related problems in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs). However, with its current architecture, especially with the unavailability of the global network information, VANET has not been able to fulfill some of the necessities for efficient information dissemination and most critically, still lacks flexibility and programmability. Recently, Software Defined Networking (SDN) has been introduced into the vehicular domain in order to overcome the shortcomings in VANET. SDN is capable of handling the dynamic nature of networks with intelligent applications while lowering operational costs through simplified hardware and software. Yet, the architectural limitations of the presented Software Defined Vehicular Networks (SDVN), especially the centralization of control plane and its placement, have imposed doubts on its usability especially in the midst of stringent delay requirement of VANET applications.

As the automotive and telecommunication industries advance, more vehicles are becoming connected, leading to the realization of intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) supports various ITS services, including safety, convenience, and infotainment services for drivers and passengers. Generally, such services are realized through data sharing among vehicles and nearby infrastructures or vehicles over multi-hop data routing mechanisms. Vehicular data routing faces many challenges caused by vehicle dynamicity, intermittent connectivity, and diverse application requirements. Consequently, the software-defined networking (SDN) paradigm offers unique features such as programmability and flexibility to enhance vehicular network performance and management and meet the quality of services (QoS) requirements of various VANET services. Recently, VANET routing protocols have been improved using the multilevel knowledge and an up-to-date global view of traffic conditions offered by SDN technology. The primary objective of this study is to furnish comprehensive information regarding the current SDN-based VANET routing protocols, encompassing intricate details of their underlying mechanisms, forwarding algorithms, and architectural considerations. Each protocol will be thoroughly examined individually, elucidating its strengths, weaknesses, and proposed enhancements. Also, the software-defined vehicular network (SDVN) architectures are presented according to their operation modes and controlling degree. Then, the potential of SDN-based VANET is explored from the aspect of routing and the design requirements of routing protocols in SDVNs. SDVN routing algorithms are uniquely classified according to various criteria. In addition, a complete comparative analysis will be achieved to analyze the protocols regarding performance, optimization, and simulation results. Finally, the challenges and upcoming research directions for developing such protocols are widely stated here. By presenting such insights, this paper provides a comprehensive overview and inspires researchers to enhance existing protocols and explore novel solutions, thereby paving the way for innovation in this field.

In today's digital era, multimedia streaming is one of the major sources of internet traffic and it is also expected to grow significantly in upcoming years. Even though traditional Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANET) provide solutions for multimedia content delivery through best effort, the Quality of Experience (QoE) of these techniques is crucially damaged by dynamic network changes, fluctuations in bandwidth and congestion in the network due to lack of global view. However, all these limitations can be substantially reduced by the introduction of Software Defined Network (SDN) architecture. Hence this hybrid network called Software Defined Vehicular Network (SDVN) introduces a global view, flexibility, scalability and smartness in multimedia streaming. The proposed work uses a POX controller with an OpenFlow Spanning Tree topology discovery unit-based SDN framework for the real-world vehicular network. This modified POX was compared with the traditional vehicular network and a normal POX for QoE parameters like Multi Scale Structural Similarity, Three Component Structural Similarity, Blurring, Delta, Mean sum of absolute difference and Noise estimation. For testing, a Standard Definition (SD) video was streamed between vehicular nodes under dense and real-world traffic scenarios. The QoE Metrics of Modified POX improved between 1 % to 42%. Hence the proposed Modified POX presents an enhanced end-to-end QoE for multimedia streaming service.

With the development of the vehicular communications technology, roadside units (RSUs) placement problem has recently received considerable attentions in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). This paper addresses the roadside units (RSUs) placement problem for traffic flow coverage requirement number in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Given a set of road segments, some traffic flows and a coverage requirement number n, the problem is how to find the optimal placement of RSUs, such that each traffic flow is covered by at least n RSUs. We first investigate full RSUs placement problem, which place all the RSUs on the given road segments totally. We prove that this problem is NP-hard. Then, we propose a greedy algorithm to solve the problem and theoretical analysis is given. We also study incremental RSUs placement problem, which place the partial RSUs based on the deployed RSUs on the given road segments. Based on the proposed greedy algorithm, we also propose a algorithm to solve the incremental RSUs placement problem. Extensive simulations have been conducted to show the performance of our proposed algorithms is superior to the other algorithms.

Software-defined vehicular network (SDVN): A survey on architecture and routing

In Vehicular (Ad-hoc) Network (VANET), besides Vehicle-to-Vehicle communications (V2V), vehicles in VANET also exchange data with Road-Side-Units (RSUs) and Cellular Base Stations (Vehicle-to-Infrastructure communications (V2I)). With the introduction of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS), VANETs possess a great potential in enabling surveillance services. The rapid development of wireless communication technologies recently results in empowering data exchange among vehicles, RSUs and Cellular Base Stations, improving various types of applications and services such as safety driving, route planning, traffic alert, and context-aware infotainment. However, the benefits offered by VANETs and ITS cannot be fully realized unless there is a mechanism to effectively defend against fake and erroneous information exchange from malicious or dysfunctional nodes to other vehicles and RSUs for their own purposes. In this regards, trust appears as one of the solutions for VANETs to establish secure connectivity and reliable services. The conceptual idea to tackle down this challenges is that only data from trusted vehicles is taken into account. Thus, the aim is to evaluate trust of a vehicle in exchanging high quality of information. This paper presents the trust concept, key characteristics, a trust evaluation model, and a prototype for trusted data exchange activities in VANETs.

The appropriate design of a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) has become a pivotal way to build an efficient smart transportation system, which enables various applications associated with traffic safety and highly-efficient transportation. VANETs are vulnerable to the threat of malicious nodes stemming from its dynamicity and infrastructure-less nature and causing performance degradation. Recently, software-defined networking (SDN) has provided a feasible way to manage VANETs dynamically. In this article, we propose a novel software-defined trust based VANET architecture (SD-TDQL) in which the centralized SDN controller is served as a learning agent to get the optimal communication link policy using a deep <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$Q$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -learning approach. The trust of each vehicle and the reverse delivery ratio are considered in a joint optimization problem, which is modeled as a Markov decision process with state space, action space, and reward function. Specifically, we use the expected transmission count ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$ETX$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ) as a metric to evaluate the quality of the communication link for the connected vehicles’ communication. Moreover, we design a trust model to avoid the bad influence of malicious vehicles. Simulation results prove that the proposed SD-TDQL framework enhances the link quality.

The vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) is a promising technology in near future. VANET allows vehicles to communicate with each other and with roadside units (RSUs). Wireless Access in Vehicular Environment (WAVE), defined by IEEE, provides the Internet connectivity for vehicles as well as vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication. RSUs can form a wireless mesh network (WMN) as a backbone infrastructure to enhance the performance of VANET. However, WAVE supports only one-hop communications for IP packets in VANET, and existing researches do not consider the compatibility between VANET and WMN infrastructure formed by RSUs. We propose the extended WMN (ExWMN) which has the feasibility to extend WMN to VANET domain. In ExWMN, the vehicles can send IP packets to an access router by using the multi-hop capability of WMN. ExWMN uses the addressing scheme of WMN for the extended VANET domain and exploits geographical routing protocols instead of existing routing protocols of WMN due to VANET characteristics such as mobility and dynamically changing network topologies. ExWMN supports the compatibility between the extended VANET and a WMN infrastructure due to RSUs, which provide a bridging function between them. This paper presents the architecture and the detailed procedures of the ExWMN.

Emerging as the effective strategy of intelligent transportation system (ITS), vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have the capacity of drastically improving the driving experience and road safety. In typical VANET scenarios, high mobility and volatility of vehicles result in dynamic topology of vehicular networks. That is, individual vehicle may pass through the effective domain of multiple neighboring road-side-units (RSUs) during a comparatively short time interval. Hence, efficient and low-latency cross-domain verification with all the successive RSUs is of significance. Recently, a lot of research on VANET authentication and key distribution was presented, while the critical cross-domain authentication (CDA) issue has not been properly addressed. Particularly, the existing CDA solutions mainly reply on the acquired confidential keying information from the neighboring entities (RSUs and vehicles), while too much trustworthiness is granted to the involved RSUs. Please note that the RSUs are distributively located and may be compromised or disabled by adversary, thus vital vehicle information may be revealed. Furthermore, frequent data interactions between RSUs and cloud server are always the major requisite so as to achieve mutual authentication with cross-domain vehicles, which leads to heavy bandwidth consumption and high latency. In this paper, we address the above VANET cross-domain authentication issue under the novel RSU edge networks assumption. Please note that RSUs are assumed to be semi-trustworthy entity in our design, where critical vehicular keying messages remain secrecy. Homomorphic encryption design is applied for all involved RSUs and vehicles. In this way, successive RSUs could efficiently verify the cross-domain vehicle with the transited certificate from the neighbor RSUs and vehicle itself, while the identity and secrets of each vehicle is hidden all the time. Afterwards, dynamic updating towards the anonymous vehicle identity is conducted upon validation, where conditional privacy preserving is available. Moreover, pairing-free mutual authentication method is used for efficiency consideration. Formal security analysis is given, proving that the HCDA mechanism yields desirable security properties on VANET cross domain authentication issue. Performance discussions demonstrate efficiency of the proposed HCDA scheme compared with the state-of-the-art.

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is a backbone of intelligent transportation system that is envisaged to play a significant role in the futuristic smart cities for safety and traffic management. Designing an optimal multi‐hop routing protocol with lower transmission delay and reduced overhead has remained to be a challenge owing to the inability of existing VANET architecture to handle scalability and flexibility efficiently. The present work incorporates an emerging network paradigm called software defined network (SDN) in VANETs. The SDN provides a global view of the network topology and includes programmability to vehicular networks. The architecture manages the complex and highly dynamic vehicular network in an abstract and simplified way by decoupling the control plane from the data plane. The work introduces a SDN‐enabled connectivity‐aware geographical routing protocol (SCGRP), a performance‐enhanced protocol for an optimised transmission of data packets. The SCGRP is simulated using MININET‐Wi‐Fi and SUMO and the results are evaluated over the existing centralised routing protocol (CRP) routing protocol to prove its better performance.

Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) technology enables efficient inter-vehicular communications for the broad-casting of public-safety and other critical message flows among unmanned autonomous vehicles. A key challenge in VANET broadcasting is to achieve a high throughput rate while at the same time assure the delivery of packet flows to all the vehicles traveling over a targeted segment of the highway. We have proposed a Vehicular Backbone Network (VBN) protocol for dynamically synthesizing a networking scheme that supports message flows from a Road Side Unit (RSU) to vehicles traveling along a highway. Though proven to achieve significant throughput-rate improvements compared with existing protocols, a design of a VBN that maximizes the end-to-end throughput rate while guaranteeing the coverage scope of message flows has not been addressed. In this paper, we develop an analytical model that accurately characterizes the maximum throughput rate performance achievable under a prescribed outage probability constraint. We consider a spatial-reuse TDMA-based VBN. A joint optimization of inter-relay distances, transmission rates, and spatial-reuse factors, which has not yet been addressed in the existing literatures, is carried out. These results are confirmed by comparison with simulation results. They also serve as essential benchmark and performance upper bounds that characterize the behavior of robust distributed VBN protocols, applicable to VANET systems that provide vehicle-to-vehicle communications among stochastically roaming highway vehicles.

With the rising interest of expedient, safe, and high-efficient transportation, vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have turned into a critical technology in smart transportation systems. Because of the high mobility of nodes, VANETs are vulnerable to security attacks. In this paper, we propose a novel framework of software-defined VANETs with trust management. Specifically, we separate the forwarding plane in VANETs from the control plane, which is responsible for the control functionality, such as routing protocols and trust management in VANETs. Using the on-demand distance vector routing (TAODV) protocol as an example, we present a routing protocol named software-defined trust based ad hoc on-demand distance vector routing (SD-TAODV). Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed software-defined VANETs with trust management.