Performance Improvement of Vehicular Ad Hoc Network Environment by Cooperation between SDN/OpenFlow Controller and IEEE 802.11p

Abstract

Vehicular communication has recently become an active research issue in both academic and industry. Vehicular Network, by nature, could possess potential problems in connectivity, intelligence, scalability and flexibility. Networking technology nowadays is moving toward to Software-Defined Networking (SDN) concept where the network is mainly separated into two planes; control plane and data plane. OpenFlow is the most popular open interface for SDN southbound API. In this paper, we proposed the SDN application over Vehicular ad hoc Network (VANET) environment. We believe that the emerging SDN technology and IEEE 802.11p can be used to increase the efficiency and to bridge the gaps in VANET application. We hope to exploit the benefit of SDN by adopting POX/OpenFlow controller to process and perform message routing. A centralized controller is the key player to enable communication between vehicles and roadside unit (RSU). We evaluated the proposed work based on three simulation indicators, such as packet delivery ratio, throughput and packet delay time.