From Theory to Experimental Evaluation: Resource Management in Software-Defined Vehicular Networks

Managing resources in dynamic vehicular environments is a tough task, which is becoming more challenging with the increased number of access technologies today available in connected cars (e.g., IEEE 802.11, LTE), in the variety of applications provided on the road (e.g., safety, traffic efficiency, and infotainment), in the amount of driving awareness/coordination required (e.g., local, context, and cooperative awareness), and in the level of automation toward zero-accident driving (e.g., platooning and autonomous driving). The open programmability and logically centralized control features of the software-defined networking (SDN) paradigm offer an attractive means to manage communication and networking resources in the vehicular environment and promise improved performance. In this paper, we enumerate the potentials of software-defined vehicular networks, analyze the need to rethink the traditional SDN approach from theoretical and practical standpoints when applied in this application context, and present an emulation approach based on the proposed node car architecture in Mininet-WiFi to showcase the applicability and some expected benefits of SDN in a selected use case scenario.