Software Defined Internet of Vehicles for Automation and Orchestration

We are introducing an innovative networking approach to the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) for their automation and orchestration by redesigning the wireless edge framework. To this end, we propose to expand the Software Defined Networking (SDN) functionality from the edge network to the cars, i.e. equipping our vehicles with mobile base stations having SDN capabilities. By adopting such a novel approach, most of the impending IoV automation and orchestration challenges are ameliorated, which has been extremely difficult and non-trivial to tackle by using standard existing approaches. The three primary challenges identified in this context are a) the scalability of the network of connected autonomous vehicles, b) the desirable security of the IoV data networking, and c) the flexibility of quality of experience (QoE) perceived by the vehicles. To tackle the aforementioned three challenges, we design a policy-driven framework for a secure and efficient IoV networking paradigm and then investigate its performance via analytic modeling. More importantly, from the IoV data networking perspective, we design an intent-based flow offloading scheme to facilitate enhanced and adjustable QoE. Furthermore, we develop a rigorous analysis to quantify the efficiency of the proposed SDN-capable IoV data networking by modeling TCP connections over WiFi. Using mathematics as a tool for reasoning the three key challenges, our feasibility analysis is validated with extensive simulations. Finally, we provide new insights by deriving the stability conditions for the data flow dynamics of the proposed approach.

I. Introduction

With the growing advancements in Software Defined Networking (SDN) using network slicing and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) the evolution towards enhanced performance of Internet of vehicles [1] such as, computer vision for identifying road obstacles and human level intelligence for adapting their communication performance has already been evident [2]–[7]. The future of Internet of Vehicles (IoV) depends on it‘s performance and due to it‘s delay sensitiveness, real-time computing and security concerns [3]; it is often impractical to collect all the data to a centralized server [5]. Due to the potential high number of IoVs and the need for them to quickly respond to real world applications, traditional cloud-based approaches are relatively sluggish and inadequate. To this end, we believe that on-vehicle SDN can enhance the performance of the volume and variety of data transfer by accelerating the reliable data communication protocols, such as TCP [8].