A novel proactive controller deployment protocol for 5G-enabled software-defined Vehicular Networks

With the vast expansion of data loads across numerous safety and infotainment applications, the software-defined paradigm has become a critical component for 5G-enabled and intelligent vehicular networks. By transforming the network’s rigid hardware devices into programmable units, SDVN offers a broad view of the entire network status and a standard interface between heterogeneous wireless access technologies. However, deploying a centralized control unit carries several problems, such as bottleneck issues and densification issues. A distributed control plane is a potential alternative to a centralized control plane. Still, it poses many questions about the optimal location of local control units and the number of control units required for a given network structure. In this article, we propose an efficient proactive controller deployment and assignment strategy for distributed 5G-enabled software-defined Vehicular Networks based on predictive vehicles’ traffic flow information and communication delays between switch-enabled roadside units. A thorough performance evaluation is conducted under different vehicular network’s mobility scenarios. We assess the performance of the proposed method in terms of communication latency and load on the subsequent control units and their assigned set of switches. The proposed proactive clustering method is compared to different forms of controller placement methods. The results showed that the proposed approach reduced the network’s communication delays while maintaining a balanced distributed load among controllers over the simulation time.