Link Dynamics based Packet Routing Framework for Software Defined Vehicular Networks

Data transmission in vehicular networks suffers heavily from its inherent dynamic nature as the connections between vehicles exist only for a limited amount of time. Therefore, the packets frequently find it hard to get through to the destination in multi hop data transmission as links are vulnerable in their existence. Conventional Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) routing protocols struggle in this sense, as they do not have a global network view to tackle these scenarios. But Software Defined Networking (SDN) fills this gap in VANET, and the packets can be routed better by coping with the dynamic nature of the network more effectively. However, existing routing schemes in Software Defined Vehicular Networks (SDVN) have utilized this advantage only in finding the shortest path. As an alternative, we introduce a novel packet routing framework which scrutinizes the dynamic nature of wireless links. Rather than just focusing on the shortest path, we also bring the focus to the stability of the route in finding the optimal paths. Thus, we formulate the packet routing problem as a minimum cost capacitated flow problem and find multiple paths which are stable enough to deliver a given number of packets successfully.