Software defined networking approach for efficient information dissemination in 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.

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.

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

A comparative classification of information dissemination approaches in vehicular ad hoc networks from distinctive viewpoints: A survey

Controller placement optimization in hierarchical distributed software defined vehicular networks

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.

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 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.

Connected vehicles are revolutionizing the way in which transport and mobility are conceived. The main technology behind is the so-called Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs), which are communication networks that connect vehicles and facilitate various services. Usually these services require a centralized architecture where the main server collects and disseminates information from/to vehicles. In this paper, we focus on improving the downlink information dissemination in VANETs with this centralized architecture. With this aim, we model the problem as a Vertex Covering optimization problem and we propose four new nature-inspired methods to solve it: Bat Algorithm (BA), Firefly Algorithm (FA), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), and Cuckoo Search (CS). The new methods are tested over data from a real scenario. Results show that these metaheuristics, especially BA, FA and PSO, can be considered as powerful solvers for this optimization problem.

With the astonishing emergence of connected and autonomous vehicles along with their growing demand on processing and computation, Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANET) is being viewed as one of the enabling technology. VANET aims at providing services like vehicle road safety, enhancing traffic management and travel efficiency, comfort and ease of travelling for travelers and drivers. But with current architecture, VANET is not able to work up to its full potential. Today's VANET face lot of challenges like lack of flexibility in architecture as a result of which deployment at large scale is a difficult task, lack of programmability, high latency etc. In this paper we are going to review paradigms like Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) and Software Defined Network (SDN) which are being used alongside of VANET to achieve low latency, programmability and flexibility. We also discuss benefits and services provided by MEC and SDN in 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.

Software Defined Network (SDN) is getting popularity both from academic and industry. Lot of researches have been made to combine SDN with future Internet paradigms to manage and control networks efficiently. SDN provides better management and control in a network through decoupling of data and control plane. Named Data Networking (NDN) is a future Internet technique with aim to replace IPv4 addressing problems. In NDN, communication between different nodes done on the basis of content names rather than IP addresses. Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) is a subtype of MANET which is also considered as a hot area for future applications. Different vehicles communicate with each other to form a network known as VANET. Communication between VANET can be done in two ways (i) Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) (ii) Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I). Combination of SDN and NDN techniques in future Internet can solve lot of problems which were hard to answer by considering a single technique. Security in VANET is always challenging due to unstable topology of VANET. In this paper, we merge future Internet techniques and propose a new scheme to answer timing attack problem in VANETs named as Timing Attack Prevention (TAP) protocol. Proposed scheme is evaluated through simulations which shows the superiority of proposed protocol regarding detection and mitigation of attacker vehicles as compared to normal timing attack scenario in NDN based VANET.

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.

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.

Vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) is the key component of intelligent transportation system (ITS) for various services like road safety and traffic efficiency. However, current VANET architectures provide less flexibility and scalability for vehicle-to-vehicle communication because of static underlying network infrastructure. Based on the software defined networking (SDN), open programmable networks through logically centralized control, this paper proposes a VANET monitoring system to provide a resilient and efficient routing for better services for communication between vehicles. It also provides the secure channels between the SDN controller and the network devices for reliable communication. Experimental results show that our proposed system selects the best path according less network latency in VANET.