Utilizing Roadside Units and Software Defined Networking to Route Packets Efficiently in 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 entire network. In a previous paper, the authors 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 routing paradigms. In this paper, we upgrade ROAMER by shifting the routing operations into the SDN. Hence, we present SURFER, a routing protocol for Internet of Vehicles (IoV) that makes use of a distributed SDN architecture within the RSU network in order to route packets efficiently. We describe the extensive simulations that we performed to test SURFER and compare it to two very recent routing protocols for IoV. The simulation results illustrated the high efficiency of SURFER in terms of packet delivery, latency, and network overhead.