Link Stability Based Hybrid Routing Protocol For Software Defined Vehicular Networks

The dynamic nature of vehicular networks imposes a lot of challenges in multi-hop data transmission as links are vulnerable in their existence. Thus, the packets frequently find it difficult to get through to the destination as links only exist for a limited amount of time. The broadcasting based conventional routing protocols struggle to cope with these situations due to the lack of global network information. But, with the novel Software Defined Vehicular Network (SDVN) architecture, link stability can be better scrutinized pertaining to the availability of global network view. However, due to the imperfections in the SDVN architectures and dynamicity in vehicular networks, the control plane may not possess all the network information at a given point in time. Considering all these factors, in this paper, we introduce a novel routing framework for SDVN which is composed of both centralized and distributed routing mechanisms. The resulting hybrid routing framework focuses on finding stable multiple short routes that can deliver a given number of packets, and in case of uncertain network conditions, a broadcasting approach is adopted. The overall problem is formulated as a minimum cost capacitated flow problem and the effectiveness is demonstrated comparatively via extensive simulations.