An Adaptive Traffic-Flow based Controller Deployment Scheme for Software-Defined Vehicular Networks

Abstract

Software-Defined Vehicular Networks has been a vital component for heterogeneous radio access technologies to support massive data load through various safety and infotainment applications. Elevating the constraint of static hardware network devices into a programmable unit and providing a global view of the network status and standard interface between heterogeneous radio access technologies. However, having a logically centralized control unit brings several challenges, including bottleneck problem and densification issues. A distributed control plane comes as a possible solution to the centralized control plane yet with several questions of where to deploy the control units and how many SDN controllers are needed in a given network structure. In this paper, we present an adaptive Flow-based controller deployment and assignment strategy for distributed Software-Defined Vehicular Networks through the utilization of the communication latencies between switch-enabled access points and their corresponding vehicles' flow over a time window. We evaluate the proposed method's performance in terms of end-to-end delay and load on the resulted controller's points and their cluster's set. The clustering method is compared to several types of static placement strategies, in which the proposed method showed a reduction in controllers' average delays while distributing the load among them over time.