Augmenting Vehicular Network with Software Defined Internet-of Vehicles Paradigm

The tightly coupled control plane and data plane in inbuilt hardware devices such as switches and routers are not suitable to meet the current needs of vehicular network requirements. The complexity to integrate moving devices with other high-speed moving devices and heterogeneous elements in the vehicular network is due to high-speed mobility where network topology changes dynamically and sometimes communication is also broken because of short network range of devices. The decentralized decisions of routing and switching in the traditional network architecture, where control plane and data plane are tightly coupled, demands an innovative approach for the routing and switching of network packets. Software-defined network (SDN) is a promising network architecture, which decouples the control plane from the inbuilt device. SDN can be a single or multiple controllers based network system. An SDN having multiple controllers with self-organization capability provides fault tolerance and handle heterogeneity and scalability with collaborative behaviour. In this paper, we propose to augment the traditional vehicular network architecture with SDN to embrace the required computational demand in networking with fault tolerance. The controller is a software program that can be programmed to address various issues of vehicular network intelligently by improving the performance of information exchange between the vehicles. OpenNet with POX controller is used to emulate the SDN on network topology and confirm its effectiveness.