Realization of flexible and scalable VANETs through SDN and virtualization

Abstract

Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs) are being considered as one of the enabling technologies to avoid road accidents by allowing the vehicles to share the traffic-related information among themselves. Additionally, the VANETs can be used for traffic management and infotainment applications. Flexibility, scalability, and multitenancy are some of the important characteristics of a VANET which are required to realize the deployment of VANET services efficiently. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical Software-Defined Network (SDN) based architectural framework for VANET with support of network virtualization which would make the deployment of a particular VANET flexible in time, space and the type of services offered by it. We also introduce the concept of virtual private VANETs (VPVs) to support multitenancy in VANET. This will allow a VANET service provider to deploy its services over a single physical infrastructure (probably owned by a third party) quickly in a cost effective manner and in isolation to the other services running on the same infrastructure but owned by different service providers.