Software-defined vehicular backhaul

The network of roads and highways is a promising candidate to help network operators offload their infrastructure and cope with the ever-growing amount of data exchanged on the Internet. By piggybacking data onto vehicles, roads can be turned into a large-capacity transmission system when considering the increasing number of journeys involving vehicles. The data to be transferred is opportunistically loaded on or off the vehicles at specific locations referred to as offloading spots. Two of the main challenges of such a system are how to assign the road paths matching the data transfer requirements and how much data to allocate to each flow of vehicles. We propose a centralized SDN-like architecture consisting of a central controller acting as a service broker and the offloading spots as SDN agents. The controller computes the road paths that accommodate the data transfer requirements and installs the corresponding forwarding states at each offloading spot along those paths. We describe our SDN-controlled offloading system and evaluate its performance using road traffic counts from France. Our numerical results show that the controller can achieve efficient and fair allocation of multiple data transfers between major cities of France. Each transfer successfully delivers over 10 PB of data within a week when considering that 10% of vehicles on the road are equipped with 1TB of storage.