Software-defined vehicular networks: Opportunities and challenges

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANET) are an important network environment to improve travailing safety, comfort and efficiency. However, due to the highly dynamic network topology and large network scale, efficient network management in VANET remains a big challenge. To simplify network management, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has rapidly emerged as a widely accepted networking paradigm for wired networks. In this paper, we propose Software-Defined Vehicular Networks (SDVN) that integrates the SDN paradigm with VANET. We show possible opportunities that SDVN may bring to VANET, such as a simpler network management, a better network performance and a faster network innovation. We also point out some new research challenges caused by the inherent characteristic of VANET in SDVN.