Het-SDVN: SDN-Based Radio Resource Management of Heterogeneous V2X for Cooperative Perception

The transformation and innovation brought by vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications are ongoing. Enhanced road safety, traffic efficiency, and vehicle automation are all promised on condition that the envisioned V2X applications can be realized. “Share what I can see” is one of the visions, known as cooperative perception (CP). CP enables sensor data sharing, while the types of data are diverse according to the levels of vehicle automation. To support sharing raw, pre-processed, and fully processed data, V2X is advancing. Emerging radio access technologies (RATs), like millimeter waves (mmWave), are introduced. V2X networks become more heterogeneous than ever before. To fill in the gaps that existing V2X networks lack interoperability and a network function to manage heterogeneous V2X, this paper proposes Het-SDVN, a software defined networking (SDN)-based vehicular network (SDVN) architecture for heterogeneous V2X. Compared to the counterparts, Het-SDVN features hierarchical control planes (C-planes), which can reduce overhead and latency, provide scalability, and guarantee the availability of CP. This paper also presents the demonstration of Het-SDVN in a real-life proof of concept. Through the response to diverse CP requests, the required V2X performance, the capability of local SDVN, and the importance of interference management are all revealed. Besides, a benchmarking test in flow installation for local and global SDVN controllers is carried out. Finally, this paper shows the visualization results of CP.