Software-Defined Heterogeneous Vehicular Networks: Taxonomy and Architecture

Heterogeneous vehicular networks (HetVNets) are a promising approach to meet the various communication requirements of vehicular networks' services using a variety of available access networks. However, due to their inherited characteristics, HetVNets are rigid, difficult to manage and suffer from a lack of programmability, flexibility, and scalability. In this paper, we first highlight the limits of current HetVNet architectures and show what the emerging software-defined networking (SDN) paradigm can bring to overcome these limitations with a focus on some use cases. We also provide a taxonomy of existing software-defined heterogeneous vehicular networks architectures and discuss their limits. Based on that, we continue by proposing a new SDN-based architecture for HetVNet. It is a cluster-based architecture with a semicentralized hierarchical control and an efficient fall back recovery mechanism, that functions in both infrastructure-less and infrastructure-based covered vehicular scenarios. Finally, we demonstrate the feasibility and the efficiency of the proposed architecture compared to the related SDN-based HetVNet architectures through simulation results.