SDVN Enabled Traffic Light Cooperative Framework for E-SIoV Mobility in a Smart City Scenario

The Social Internet of Vehicles (SIoVs) is an advanced approach to vehicular networking that connects specialized vehicles to share and exchange information, such as traffic jams, parking spaces, and more. This work aims to establish a network of emergency SIoVs (E-SIoVs) for frequent communication during vehicle movement across intersections to reduce average occupancy and waiting time. To achieve this objective, this work presents a novel software-defined vehicle networking-based E-SIoV framework assisted by a Smart Traffic Light Controller (STLC). Software-Defined Vehicular Networking (SDVN) based on an E-SIoV network utilizes communication between Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) for data receiving and control signal dissemination. The SDVN module generates a congestion prevention signal in the form of a new cycle phase duration. To do this, a modified linear-quadratic regulator, Quantize-LQR (QLQR), is proposed and deployed on SDVN-Controller (SDVNC). Following the output of QLQR as feedback, the proposed max-pressure-based STLC generates effective control signals. Further, two levels of prioritization are implemented in the city to improve E-SIoV movement: (i) E-SIoV and (ii) lanes with E-SIoV. In the first level, higher weight is assigned to E-SIoV, and in the second level, lanes are prioritized based on the quantity of E-SIoVs. A well-known open-source Simulation of Urban MObility (SUMO) simulator has been utilized to validate the proposed framework on an Indian city's OpenStreetMap. The proposed framework outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches on several performance metrics.