Software-Defined Vehicular Networks (SDVN) for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS)

Introduction

Over the years there has been tremendous advancement in vehicular technology. While network and communication technology made its way into the vehicles for applications such as comfort, driver assist, and fleet management, gradually vehicle communication is advancing towards vehicle-to-everything (V2X) scenarios. Under V2X communication, a vehicle is capable of Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V), Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I), Vehicle-to-Cloud (V2C), Vehicle-to-Pedestrian (V2P), Vehicle-to-Device (V2D), and Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G), to name a few. There are standards (including protocols) such as Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) IEEE 802.11p, Wireless Access for Vehicular Environments (WAVE) and Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC), (Wang, Mao & Gong, 2017; Abboud, Omar & Zhuang, 2016; Storck & Duarte-Figueiredo, 2020; Jiang & Delgrossi, 2008; Morgan, 2010; Li, 2010), defined to enable such communications. Enabling vehicles to communicate between each other and with their surroundings paves way for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS).

Tremendous rise in communication and computing devices in vehicular networks has led to a surge of the need for bandwidth, storage, and computing power in these networks (Chahal et al., 2017) and (Jaballah, Conti & Lal, 2019). Maintenance and management of contemporary networks using traditional networking techniques is complex and expensive. Hence, traditional networking is being enhanced with Software-Defined Networking (SDN) as it eliminates manual configuration of networking hardware and helps in attaining programmability and flexibility of networks where control and data planes are decoupled (Kirkpatrick, 2013). The SDN techniques facilitate service design, delivery and operational procedures by means of dynamic resource allocation and policy enforcement schemes, data models and automated configuration tasks.

Vehicular communication is an enabler for autonomous vehicles of the future. It involves exchanging messages related to safety, navigation, traffic condition and congestion control, as well as multimedia, general purpose Internet access, location-based services (such as nearby hospitals, service stations, gas stations, parking places or restaurants), traffic conditions, and congestion control. These applications have different delay, and bandwidth requirements. The packet loss and propagation requirements (in terms of communication scheme for example unicast or multicast, symmetric or asymmetric, and bidirectional and unidirectional transmission). While applications such as vehicular safety, navigation, multimedia, traffic conditions, and congestion control require real-time performance, reliability, high bandwidth, and low-latency operation; other applications such as general-purpose Internet access and location-based services may be able to withstand nominal delays. Integration of SDN technology with vehicular networks (VNs) will facilitate the programmability of networks by means of dynamic network resource allocation schemes based on the application requirements and network constraints (among others) (Jaballah, Conti & Lal, 2019; Chahal et al., 2017). SDN-based VNs are termed as Software Defined Vehicular Networks (SDVN).

The remainder of this chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the role of vehicular communication in ITS and the characteristics of vehicular networks. Section 3 discusses the importance of incorporating SDN architectures in vehicular network communication. The taxonomy for the role of SDVN in VN programmability, heterogeneity, connectivity, resource utilization, safety and security, routing and traffic management is provided. Section 4 presents the simplified view of the SDVN architecture comprising the three planes/layers and corresponding interfaces. The operations carried out by the three planes and their respective components are presented. Section 5 discusses the key challenges and open research issues in the area of SDVN. Section 6 concludes the chapter.