Data Dissemination in Software-Defined Vehicular Networks

Data dissemination is a fundamental yet challenging issue in vehicular networks. Due to high mobility, the vehicular network topology is random and fast- changing in both the time and spatial domains. How to fully utilize limited wireless resources for supporting heterogeneous safety and multimedia services in vehicular networks is a pressing, open issue. In this article, we leverage the software- defined network architecture for hybrid vehicular networks, using both vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) wireless communication technologies to ensure network performance and quality of services (QoS). The architecture of the software-defined vehicular network (SDVN) is introduced. A simulation study on how to take advantage of the SDVN framework for efficient and effective data dissemination has been given. Further research problems and opportunities are discussed.