SURFER: A Secure SDN-Based Routing Protocol for Internet of Vehicles

Software-defined networking (SDN) is becoming the most dominant method for network management. By decoupling the control plane from the data plane, SDN provides a centralized view and more flexibility, scalability, and global knowledge of the network. In a previous paper, we presented ROAMER, a routing protocol that exploits roadside units (RSUs) in order to route messages within vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). ROAMER combines two famous routing methods that have been extensively used in VANETs, which are geographical and carry-and-forward. In this article, we upgrade ROAMER by shifting the routing operations into the SDN. Hence, we present SURFER, a routing protocol for the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) that makes use of a distributed SDN architecture and a Blockchain system within the RSU network in order to route packets securely and efficiently. We present two implementation methods for SURFER: the first uses SDN within the RSU network only, while the second method deploys SDN within the entire IoV. We implemented extensive simulations and compared SURFER to some very recent routing protocols for IoV. The simulation results illustrated the high efficiency of SURFER as compared to other IoV routing protocols in terms of latency, packet delivery, and network overhead.