SD4ADDR: Enhancing Vehicular Connectivity With SDN Through Address Translation

SDN has emerged as a new approach to network management, enabling intelligent and centralized control in VANETs. Most SDN technologies, however, have been designed exclusively with Ethernet in mind, creating significant challenges for the integration of IEEE 802.11 wireless interfaces. These challenges mainly stem from improper Medium Access Control (MAC) address translation between IEEE 802.3 and IEEE 802.11 frame headers, which often leads to the use of tunneling solutions, and consequently, challenging network control processes when operating in high mobility scenarios. This paper presents a novel approach that avoids such shortcomings, by proposing a new technique called SD4ADDR that enables a transparent and seamless resolution using a set of encapsulation techniques along with an optimized data plane for better control on Vehicle-to- Everything (V2X) communication scenarios. An evaluation was conducted showing a minimal overhead of the solution with the additional encap and decap operations, maintaining, at the same time, the throughput on UDP and TCP.