Software Defined Network-Based Multi-Access Edge Framework for Vehicular Networks

Vehicular networks aim to support cooperative warning applications that involve the dissemination of warning messages to reach vehicles in a target area. Due to the high mobility of vehicles, imperative technologies such as software-defined network (SDN) and edge computing (EC) have been proposed for the next-generation vehicular networks. The SDN separates the control plane from data plane entities and executes the control plane software on general purpose hardware. On the other hand, EC aims to reduce the network latency and packet loss rate by pushing the computations to the edge of the network. Nevertheless, the current solutions that integrate SDN and EC could not satisfy the latency requirements for data dissemination of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) services. To bridge the gap between the two technologies, the conventional EC is enhanced to multi-access edge computing (MEC) by collocating the edge computing servers with the radio access networks. In order to improve the latency for V2X services, we propose in this paper, an SDN-based multi-access edge computing framework for the vehicular networks (SDMEV). In the proposed solution, two main algorithms are implemented. First, a fuzzy logic-based algorithm is used to select the head vehicle for each evolved node B (eNB) collocated with road-side unit (RSU) for the purpose of grouping vehicles based on their communication interfaces. Afterward, an OpenFlow algorithm is deployed to update flow tables of forwarding devices at forwarding layers. In addition, a case study is presented and evaluated using the object-oriented modular discrete event network (OMNeT++) simulation framework which includes the INET framework-based SDN. Simulation results depict that the data dissemination based-SDN supported by multi-access edge computing over SDMEV can improve the latency requirements for V2X services.