5G-Slicing-Enabled Scalable SDN Core Network: Toward an Ultra-Low Latency of Autonomous Driving Service

5G networks are anticipated to support a plethora of innovative and promising network services. These services have heterogeneous performance requirements (e.g., high-rate traffic, low latency, and high reliability). To meet them, 5G networks are entailed to endorse flexibility that can be fulfilled through the deployment of new emerging technologies, mainly software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), and network slicing. In this paper, we focus on an interesting automotive vertical use case: autonomous vehicles. Our aim is to enhance the quality of service of autonomous driving application. To this end, we design a framework that uses the aforementioned technologies to enhance the quality of service of the autonomous driving application. The framework is made of 1) a distributed and scalable SDN core network architecture that deploys fog, edge and cloud computing technologies; 2) a network slicing function that maps autonomous driving functionalities into service slices; and 3) a network and service slicing system model that promotes a four-layer logical architecture to improve the transmission efficiency and satisfy the low latency constraint. In addition, we present a theoretical analysis of the propagation delay and the handling latency based on GI/M/1 queuing system. Simulation results show that our framework meets the low-latency requirement of the autonomous driving application as it incurs low propagation delay and handling latency for autonomous driving traffic compared to best-effort traffic.