Software-Defined Vehicular Networks: Architecture, Algorithms, and Applications: Part 1

The papers in this special section focus on software defined vehicular networks.With the ever more rapid development of wireless communications and the explosive usage of mobile electronics, vehicular networks have become an attainable technology to meet the imminent demands for improving traffic safety and efficiency. In addition, there is an increasing demand from traveling users to access the Internet through IP-enabled smart devices, which enables infotainment applications to have rapidly taken on an important role in the past few years. Even though several future architectures have been proposed and investigated, it has been very challenging to coordinate vehicular networks to efficiently facilitate applications with diverse quality of service (QoS) demands. Recently, software-defined networking (SDN) has been emerging as a promising paradigm to control the network in a systematic way. The flexibility and programmability of SDN, which are lacking in today’s distributed wireless substrate, not only make it attractive to satisfy the QoS requirements of vehicular multimedia services, but also simplify the resource management in vehicular networks. Consequently, there is a need to conduct research to further investigate the standardization efforts and address challenging issues in the SDN enabled vehicular networks.