Vehicular HetNet load distribution using centralized control of software-defined network

Current vehicular communication systems experience from nonflexible and costly devices, complicated control-plane protocols, and vendor-specific configuration interfaces. In the next generation vehicular communication, a mobile device (MD) will be installed on a car capable of accessing multiple services from different networks. So heterogeneous networks (HetNets) may play a vital role in vehicular communication. Despite heterogeneity, flawless connectivity between different systems is a basic need of the travellers. The key challenge for seamless connectivity is the design of a vertical handover (VHO) scheme. We claim that software-defined networking (SDN) can make things easier in the design and supervision of VHO in vehicular HetNet. The proposed method maximizes the HetNet utilization with lesser handover by balancing the load among the HetNets. Simulation results performed in MATLAB justified that this novel architecture with proper VHO technique boosts the performance by balancing the load, reducing unnecessary VHO, etc. Performance is analyzed by considering four studies, ie, handover served ratio (HSR), on board units (OBUs), OBU served ratio (OSR), and total throughput and total capacities of road side units (RSUs) to serve handover demands from OBUs. It is observed that the HSR increases rapidly as the number of OBUs increases, which indicates almost all the handover requested OBUs are allocated resources by a connected RSU. We also studied the served total throughput by considering VHO with SDN, without SDN in the average case and without SDN in the best case, and it is observed that with SDN as a central controller, the total OSR and total throughput is increased.