future internet

Article
Software-Defined Heterogeneous Vehicular
Networking: The Architectural Design and
Open Challenges
Adnan Mahmood *, Wei Emma Zhang and Quan Z. Sheng *
Department of Computing, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia; [email protected]
* Correspondence: [email protected] (A.M.); [email protected] (Q.Z.S.)

Received: 3 January 2019; Accepted: 7 March 2019; Published: 11 March 2019

Abstract: The promising advancements in the telecommunications and automotive sectors over
the years have empowered drivers with highly innovative communication and sensing capabilities,
in turn paving the way for the next-generation connected and autonomous vehicles. Today, vehicles
communicate wirelessly with other vehicles and vulnerable pedestrians in their immediate vicinity
to share timely safety-critical information primarily for collision mitigation. Furthermore, vehicles
connect with the traffic management entities via their supporting network infrastructure to become
more aware of any potential hazards on the roads and for guidance pertinent to their current and
anticipated speeds and travelling course to ensure more efficient traffic flows. Therefore, a secure
and low-latency communication is highly indispensable in order to meet the stringent performance
requirements of such safety-critical vehicular applications. However, the heterogeneity of diverse
radio access technologies and inflexibility in their deployment results in network fragmentation and
inefficient resource utilization, and these, therefore, act as bottlenecks in realizing the aims for a
highly efficient vehicular networking architecture. In order to overcome such sorts of bottlenecks,
this article brings forth the current state-of-the-art in the context of intelligent transportation systems
(ITS) and subsequently proposes a software-defined heterogeneous vehicular networking (SDHVNet)
architecture for ensuring a highly agile networking infrastructure to ensure rapid network innovation
on-demand. Finally, a number of potential architectural challenges and their probable solutions
are discussed.

Keywords: V2X communication; Internet of Things; Internet of Vehicles; heterogeneous networking;

software-defined networks; safety-critical vehicular applications

1. Introduction
Over the past few decades, the promising notion of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) has
been thoroughly studied and well-researched by researchers in both academia and industry [1].
However, the emerging and promising paradigms of cloud computing, fog and/or edge computing,
software-defined networks (SDN) and network functions virtualization have not only completely
revolutionized the wireless networking industry, but have further spurred considerable innovative
advancements for the transportation sector. This is coupled with other recent significant technological
advances pertinent to the evolution of connected and autonomous vehicles and pervasive usage
of numerous state-of-the-art sensory devices installed onboard vehicles that facilitate in a diverse
range of cooperative vehicular safety applications, i.e., forward collision warnings, emergency vehicle
assistance, (vulnerable) pedestrian collision mitigation, blind intersection warnings and hazardous
location alerts, amongst many others. These safety applications are not only critical in nature, but
further require a low-latency infrastructure with a maximum tolerable delay ranging between 10 ms
and 50 ms [2]. Furthermore, modern-day connected vehicles are equipped with on average 100 sensors

Future Internet 2019, 11, 70; doi:10.3390/fi11030070 www.mdpi.com/journal/futureinternet

Future Internet 2019, 11, 70 2 of 17

onboard, and this number is anticipated to increase up to 200 towards the end of the year 2020 [3].
These sensors not only generate the bulk amount of data, but also play an indispensable role in creating
and sharing of ambient intelligence for vehicular cooperative communication. Furthermore, as per an
estimate of Intel [4], an averagely-driven connected vehicle (i.e., a personal vehicle used for day-to-day
routine purposes and not for any commercial operations) in the near future would generate around
4000 MB (40 TB) of data for every eight hours of its driving. This is in addition to the vehicular user’s
data consumption, which on average stands at 650 MB per day and is expected to reach 1.5 GB per day
by 2020.
The questions, therefore, arise as: (a) how to tackle such a flood of data so that the meaningful
information could be accumulated, processed and utilized for the above-referred vehicular safety
applications; (b) which particular radio access technologies would be able to facilitate the transmission
of such sort of a meaningful information with higher data rates and lower end-to-end delay; and finally,
(c) where this all processing (i.e., compute and storage) needs to be tackled; as sending these data
back to the remote back-end servers would not only require excessive bandwidth, but may also
result in excessive load on the backhaul, thereby increasing the network management overhead and
compromising the service-level objectives of diverse vehicular safety applications.
The emerging and promising paradigm of software-defined networking (SDN) indicate a possible
solution to these vehicular networking challenges. SDN has been conceived and subsequently deployed
for wired networks. However, as of late, there is a rapid shift of interest towards deploying SDN
for both the wireless and ad hoc domains. This has, in turn, stimulated the interest of the academic
community to look into the possibility of designing SDN-based vehicular networks that would not only
enable secure and high bandwidth communication services, but may also provide low latency for the
safety-critical vehicular applications. SDN de-couples the control plane from the data plane, and the
overall management and orchestration of network resources is carried out via a logically-centralized
programmable controller. This, therefore, facilitates enabling a vendor-independent control of the entire
network for both network carriers and enterprises, in turn considerably simplifying the network design
and operations and laying out the foundations for a highly flexible and programmable networking
infrastructure. Hence, given a programmable SDN controller, it is easier to configure disparate network
devices and to deploy a wide array of new applications instantly. Nevertheless, despite of several
advantages that SDN brings to a networking infrastructure, it is also vulnerable to a number of security
attacks since malicious entities may launch attack on either the data plane via targeting the network
elements from within the network itself and via the southbound application programming interface
(API), by directly attacking the control plane as it acts as the centralized point of intelligence for the
entire underlying network or on the applications plane by targeting certain specialized applications
and via the northbound API. However, ensuring security in a SDN-based network remains beyond the
scope of this article.
Although a number of architectures have been recently proposed for guaranteeing an enhanced
network resource management in VANETs (kindly refer to Section 3 for details), most of them have
not accounted for the unique VANET-associated features and characteristics in their designs, i.e.,
frequent changes in network topology owing to the highly dynamic behaviour of vehicles in the data
plane, extremely large and distributed network, stringent delay constraints, the need for efficient and
smooth handovers, etc. Moreover, a number of these architectures primarily rely on accumulating
the centralized intelligence in a single centralized SDN controller, which on the one hand, provides
a global view of the entire underlying network, but on the other hand, may become a single point of
network failure in case of any unforeseen event. Thus, a re-design of the existing vehicular networking
architectures is highly indispensable.
Accordingly, this article is one of the first few research studies to bring forth the notion of a
highly reconfigurable software-defined heterogeneous vehicular networking (SDHVNet) architecture
to facilitate rapid network innovation for meeting the stringent performance requirements of diverse
safety-critical vehicular cooperative applications and services. SDHVNet is a robust and performant
Future Internet 2019, 11, 70 3 of 17

next-generation heterogeneous networking architecture for designing intelligent transportation

systems (ITS). In contrast to the existing architectures proposed in the research literature, centralized
intelligence is augmented with the localized intelligence to avoid a single point of network failure.
The remainder of this article is organized as follows. In Section 2, we outline a brief background of
vehicular networks, analyse the key radio access technological candidates for vehicular communication
along with their potential and limitations and discuss the need for heterogeneous networking. Section 3
summarizes the current state-of-the-art in the context of ITS. Section 4 depicts our proposed hierarchical
and logical architecture for the envisaged SDHVNet. Six key design challenges, together with their
probable solutions, in the context of the deployment of safety-critical applications on such SDHVNets
are also deliberated. Finally, conclusions are drawn in Section 5.

2. Background and Motivation

Vehicular networking is one of the key technologies that caters to the realization of a variety of
the aforementioned vehicular safety applications, i.e., forward collision warnings, emergency vehicle
assistance, vulnerable pedestrian collision mitigation, blind intersection warnings and hazardous
location alerts. These applications thus allow for a collection and dissemination of useful contextual
information between the vehicles (vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication), among the vehicles and
infrastructure (vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication), among the vehicles and supporting
network (vehicle-to-network (V2N) communication) and between the vehicles and vulnerable road
pedestrians (vehicle-to-pedestrian (V2P) communication), thereby strengthening the basis for the
promising paradigm of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication, as depicted in Figure 1. A secure
and low-latency communication between the vehicles and among the vehicles and the supporting
infrastructure and network is quite critical to the successful implementation of such applications.
V2X communication makes vehicles an integral part of the Internet of Things (IoT) landscape [5].
Accordingly, the emerging yet promising paradigm of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has also recently
started taking its place in the research literature [6,7].

Vehicle-to-Network Vehicle-to-Vehicle
Communication Communication

Vehicle-to-Infrastructure V2X Communication Vehicle-to-Pedestrian

Communication Communication

Figure 1. Towards seamless, ubiquitous vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication.

Over the past several years, the IEEE 802.11p/DSRC has been considered as the de facto standard for
the implementation of numerous vehicular networking applications and services. IEEE 802.11p/DSRC
is considered as a short-range wireless technology that originally evolved from the WiFi standard
and primarily operates in a 5.9-GHz ITS bandwidth [8]. While DSRC provides a fast two-millisecond
over-the-air latency, its standard performance degrades to a significant extent in urban scenarios with
abundant high-rise buildings and intersections, leading to considerable blockage in the line-of-sight
communication. Other limiting factors include fading, the high mobility of vehicles, and uncoordinated
medium access mechanisms [9]. On the contrary, the Third-Generation Partnership Project (3GPP)
has recently promulgated the notion of C-V2X, i.e., cellular vehicle-to-everything communication,
Future Internet 2019, 11, 70 4 of 17

a technological paradigm using existing and developing cellular standards for a diverse array of
vehicular connectivity applications and use-cases [10]. C-V2X is currently being developed as part of
the 3GPP objectives to accelerate the development of cellular systems from 4G to 5G by incorporating
enhancements to LTE Broadcast and LTE Direct. LTE Broadcast would facilitate both V2I and V2N
communication by leveraging traditional cellular infrastructure, wherein messages can be broadcast
from V2X servers to numerous vehicles concurrently, while the individual vehicles can unicast the
messages back to the server [11]. Enabling V2I and V2N communications is enormously advantageous
for several vehicular applications, i.e., receiving alert messages from the traffic management authorities
warning of traffic accidents and conditions several miles ahead up the road or communicating with
a smart parking facility to locate and reserve the available parking space automatically. LTE Direct
would enable robust V2V communication with a low latency of about one millisecond, at distances of
up to hundreds of meters and, more notably, both in-coverage and out-of-coverage of the traditional
cellular infrastructure [12,13].
However, the aforementioned technologies are not yet capable of supporting a gigabit per second
data rate for sharing of onboard raw sensor data (i.e., from visual cameras, radars and LiDARs)
between the vehicles and with the infrastructure [3]. Automotive cameras are typically responsible
for generating a considerable proportion of sensor data on the vehicles, and the required data rates
are typically around 100 Mbps and 700 Mbps for low- and high-resolution raw images, respectively,
after significant compression has been applied [14]. Practically, the maximum data rate for DSRC
is only around 6–27 Mbps, while 4G cellular systems are still limited to approximately 100 Mbps in
high mobility scenarios, though much lower data rates are typical. In this context, millimetre wave
communication (mmWave) remains a pivotal approach for realizing the aim of higher bandwidth
next-generation connected vehicles. The mmWave band has already been rolled out in the market in the
form of the IEEE802.11ad and supports a data rate of 7 Gbps [15]. There are substantial challenges, i.e.,
lack of accurate mmWave vehicular channel models, insufficient penetration rates and beam alignment
overhead, that still prove critical in realizing the full potential of mmWave V2X communication systems.
However, it can still prove attractive for a number of powerful vehicular safety applications such as
the bird’s eye view and see-through highlighted in the 5G Automotive Vision of the 5G Public Private
Partnerships Group (5G-PPP Group) [16]. Hence, a heterogeneous combination of diverse wireless
technologies appears to be one of the most viable options for next-generation ITS communication
platforms so that the advantages of one technology reasonably offset the disadvantages of the other.
Table 1 depicts the salient characteristics of candidate networking technologies that can match the
challenging requirements of the diverse vehicular networking applications.
Heterogeneity is also supported in the 5G Vision [17] promulgated by the 5G-PPP Group, which
regards the future 5G networks to be a heterogeneous set of air interfaces comprise of both existing
and future wireless networking technologies (especially as terahertz communication is currently being
explored for vehicular networking [18]). Seamless handovers among heterogeneous technologies
(vertical handovers) are also a native feature of the 5G-PPP’s 5G Vision. Hence, heterogeneity can
help achieve better network performance guarantees. Nevertheless, heterogeneity itself is an intricate
task to handle and leads to network fragmentation and inefficacy in network resource utilization.
Furthermore, transitioning from one radio access technology to another and the multi-hop process
involved in the routing of the network traffic could add to the overall end-to-end delay and needs to
be carefully tackled. Especially in the case of dense vehicular environments where resource demand is
particularly high and several network routing paths are available, there is a need to look for optimal
paths within the shortest possible time. This could be addressed with the help of intelligent routing
algorithms and via efficient network resource management. The emerging paradigm of SDN proposes
a possible solution to these networking challenges by providing an intelligent orchestration of the
network through its salient characteristics of reprogrammability, agility, scalability, elasticity and
flexibility. An illustration of a heterogeneous vehicular networking architecture is depicted in Figure 2.
Future Internet 2019, 11, 70 5 of 17

Table 1. Potential wireless technological candidates for vehicular communication.

DSRC mmWave
Characteristics WiFi (802.11) LTE LTE-Advanced
(802.11p) (802.11ad)
Maximum Range 100 m 1 km 100 km 100 km 10 m

Maximum 1.4, 3, 5, 10, 15,

20 MHz 10 MHz 100 MHz 2.16 GHz
Bandwidth 20 MHz
Connectivity Intermittent Intermittent Pervasive Pervasive Intermittent
Extremely
Capacity Average Average Very High Very High
High
2.4 GHz, 700–2690 450 MHz–4.99
Frequency Band 5.9 GHz 30–300 GHz
5.2 GHz MHz GHz
Peak Data Rates 54 Mbps 6–27 Mbps 300 Mbps 1 Gbps 7 Gbps
Support for Very High Very High
Low Moderate Low
Mobility (350 km/h) (350 km/h)
V2V Connectivity Ad hoc Ad hoc No D2D Ad hoc
V2I Connectivity Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Potentially
Market Penetration Very High Low Very High Low
High

Core Network
Application Server

DSRC
eNodeB
Roadside Unit

eNodeB

Cellular-based V2I Unicast DSRC-based

Communication V2I Communication

DSRC
eNodeB
Cellular-based Roadside Unit
V2I Multicast

Cellular-based V2V DSRC-based

(D2D) Communication V2V Communication

Figure 2. A heterogeneous vehicular networking architecture.

Future Internet 2019, 11, 70 6 of 17

3. The State-of-the-Art in Intelligent Transportation Systems: An Overview

A brief glimpse of the research literature reveals that a number of research studies have surveyed
the potential challenges and limitations for devising an efficient ITS. In [19], the authors presented
a comprehensive overview of the LTE-based V2X standardization activities in terms of their scope,
probable use-cases, and associated service requirements. Challenges of dense vehicular environments
and higher mobilities along with numerous technical design considerations have also been addressed.
A survey of heterogeneous vehicular networks outlining research issues, challenges and solutions
pertinent to heterogeneity at both the medium access control and network layers has been presented
in [20]. In [21], the authors outlined a systematic investigation of existing vehicular communication
systems in terms of (their) potential benefits, limitations, diverse vehicular applications and system
requirements and proposed a layered-5G vehicular networking architecture comprised of a generic
cloud layer, a core network cloud layer, a radio access network layer encompassing diverse radio
access networks and vehicles and roadside units’ space. Furthermore, a study of automotive sensing
technologies employed for active safety measures has been surveyed in [3] and opined 5G mmWave
communication as the only viable option for high-bandwidth connected vehicles.
In [22], a brief survey of both academic and industrial advances for realizing the notion of
IoV has been presented along with a debate on the potential challenges and research issues in the
implementation of the V2X connectivity. Furthermore, a survey deliberating on the state-of-the-art
vehicular localization techniques, their performance and applicability to autonomous vehicles has
been presented in [23], wherein the authors primarily focused on sensor-based technologies (GPS,
inertial motion units, cameras, radars, LiDARs and ultrasonic sensors) to determine the position of
vehicles on a specified coordinate system and employed cooperative techniques (i.e., V2V and V2I
communication via several wireless communication technologies) in order to enhance the locational
accuracy and reliability. In [24], the authors investigated the relationship between big data and IoV
within a vehicular context and primarily focused on how the IoV facilitates the big data acquisition,
ensures a seamless, ubiquitous big data transmission and enhances the storage and computational
abilities for the same. It further deliberated on a big data-enabled IoV and evaluated how big data
mining could bring considerable advantages to the IoV development in certain aspects, including, but
not limited to, network characterization, protocol design and performance evaluation.
Security is also one of the indispensable components in designing a highly efficacious and
cooperative ITS and therefore demands careful consideration. A self-contained and systematic survey
encompassing security, trust and privacy-related challenges pertaining to VANETs has been presented
in [25], wherein the authors outlined several anonymous authentication mechanisms, location privacy
protection schemes, trust management models along with their efficacy and various types of network
simulators, mobility simulators and integrated simulation platforms. In [26], the authors presented a
comprehensive survey of the recent state-of-the-art VANET security architectures, frameworks, security
standards and protocols, classification of several critical vehicular security attacks and their probable
solutions and challenges that act as the bottlenecks in the evolution of secure ITS architectures along
with future research directions. It is also highly pertinent to mention that the recent research focus
has shifted from the conventional cryptography-based security solutions (i.e., based on the certificates
and public key infrastructures) to a number of trust management schemes since: (a) vehicles in a
vehicular network are highly dynamic in nature and are randomly dispersed throughout the network;
(b) the presence of a seamless networking infrastructure cannot be guaranteed at all times; and (c) a
cryptography-based solution could be easily compromised due to insider attacks, which are not only
one of the most common security attacks, but are also extremely difficult to detect and handle [27].
Furthermore, research studies evaluating the technical feasibilities and performance analyses of
wireless networking technologies supporting diverse vehicular applications have been conducted.
A study evaluating the performance of heterogeneous vehicular networks (i.e., comprised of DSRC,
LTE and WiFi) for both V2V and V2I communication has been delineated in [28]. An application layer
handoff scheme has also been envisaged that not only guarantees optimal utilization of available
Future Internet 2019, 11, 70 7 of 17

wireless technologies, but further ensures minimizing of corresponding backhaul communication

requirements. In [29], a signalling game mechanism has been proposed for warranting an always best
connected service for vehicles traversing a geographical region equipped with heterogeneous networks.
A heterogeneous network with aims to satisfy both safety and non-safety communication requirements
of autonomous driving has been delineated in [30]. The study presented an enhanced protocol stack
and also conceived the communication messages indispensable for supporting autonomous driving
vehicles. Furthermore, a multi-tier heterogeneous adaptive vehicular networking architecture so as to
ensure reliability and low latency for safety-critical message dissemination in a vehicular networking
environment has been presented in [31]. The said architecture integrates LTE and DSRC technologies
for balancing the network traffic via offloading the packet forwarding from the cellular networks.
The architecture encompasses both high-tier nodes (i.e., public authority-operated vehicles such as
buses, taxis or any other recognized authority’s operated vehicles) and low-tier nodes (i.e., private
vehicles). The high-tier nodes broadcast beacons with relevant information via the DSRC, whereas
low-tier nodes receiving the beacons are registered with the high-tier nodes and communicate with the
infrastructure via DSRC, and not LTE. Hence, all V2V communication takes place via the registered
high-tier nodes, which primarily act as message relays. In [32], the authors presented a heterogeneous
vehicular networking framework in order to meet the communication requirements of numerous
ITS applications and services, along with a comparison of different radio access networks’ candidate
technologies. The authors opined that in contrast to DSRC, LTE is suitable for V2I communication,
whereas DSRC is much more practical than LTE D2D for V2V communication.
Off late, the emerging yet promising paradigm of SDN has been exploited for vehicular networks.
In [33], a brief survey of existing and future challenges of SDN-based vehicular networks has been
highlighted. In [34], an SDN-based vehicular communication architecture has been envisaged so as to
provide a far more agile configuration capability and to enable rapid network innovation on-demand.
Use-cases relevant to adaptive protocol deployment and multiple tenants’ isolation have been highlighted to
discuss the advantages of the said architecture in detail. In [35], a scalable and responsive SDN-enabled
vehicular networking architecture, facilitated with mobile edge computing, has been suggested to
minimize the data transmission time and for improving the quality-of-experience (QoE) of the vehicular
users for a diverse range of latency-sensitive applications. In [36], the authors suggested a hierarchical
SDN-based architecture for vehicular networks and accordingly developed a communication protocol
to address the lack of connection/coordination from the centralized SDN controller. Evaluation of the
same was carried out on a real urban mobility scenario.
In [37], an edge-up SDN-based design has been envisaged for vehicular networks in contrast to
the traditional cloud-down design typically conceived for mobile ad hoc networks. Emphasis has been
particularly placed on the latency control in order to support a diverse range of vehicular applications.
In [38], recent research advances of SDN-based vehicular networks have been investigated, and key
requirements for ensuring an efficient network resource management were outlined. A taxonomy
was also presented in terms of the salient characteristics of software-defined vehicular networks, i.e.,
radio access technologies, applications and services, network architectural components, opportunities,
system components and operational modes. In [39], an architecture supporting the cohesion of both
SDN and named data networking (NDN) has been presented to fetch the requisite content within
the vehicular networks. It thus assigns a name to the content (instead of the device, i.e., vehicle or
infrastructure), and a pull-based communication approach is then used to retrieve the requisite content,
as and when desired. In [40], a collaborative vehicular edge computing architecture has been envisaged
for facilitating collaboration between the edge computing anchors to ensure scalable and efficacious
vehicular applications and services. An abridged (self-contained) summary of the research challenges
surrounding next-generation ITS architectures is depicted in Figure 3.
Future Internet 2019, 11, 70 8 of 17

Seamless and ubiquitous communication in an ‘always best connected’ paradigm

Quality-of-service (QoS), Quality-of-experience (QoE) Network traffic prioritization (broadcast storm mitigation, network slicing)
Efficacious vertical handover schemes High bandwidth and low-latent architectures for connected vehicles
Heterogenous
networking
Efficacious network resource management Secure mechanisms for big data
Ensuring a highly scalable, re- collection in large scale IoV
configurable and reprogrammable Software- Heterogeneous nature of IoV big data
agile networking architecture defined Big data (spatio-temporal in nature – varies in
networking size, volume, and dimensionality)
Fog and/or edge computing
(Bringing intelligence to network edge) Highly dynamic topological structures in
vehicular networks poses a constraint in
Intelligent edge-based caching Intelligent acquiring accurate neighbourhood
(IoV caching architectures, content transportation
popularity, location-specific content, etc.)
systems Data authentication
Cooperative awareness messages Data integrity
(periodic – vehicle’s state info.) Safety
Data confidentiality
Decentralized environmental & Security
notification messages (to alert drivers non-safety Access control
concerning any hazardous event)
Data non-repudiation
Non-safety (i.e., infotainment) applications
Anti-jamming
Energy
efficiency
Vehicular clustering
(Stable connectivity, data offloading, Maximizing of fuel economy
content sharing, etc. )

Vehicular platooning (string of vehicles drive along the

same trajectory based on common/shared objectives)

Figure 3. Research challenges surrounding next-generation ITS architectures.

Future Internet 2019, 11, 70 9 of 17

Although a number of architectures have been recently proposed in the research literature for
ensuring an enhanced network resource management in VANETs, most of them did not account for
the unique VANET-associated features and characteristics in their designs, i.e., frequent changes in
network topology owing to the highly dynamic behaviour of vehicles in the data plane, extremely large
and distributed network, stringent delay constraints, the need for efficient and smooth handovers, etc.
Moreover, a number of these architectures primarily rely on accumulating the centralized intelligence in
a single centralized SDN controller, which undoubtedly provides a global view of the entire underlying
network, but may also become a single point of network failure in case of an unfortunate event. Therefore,
localized intelligence in addition to centralized intelligence is extremely indispensable for realizing the
true potential of SDN-based HetVNets.

4. Towards Software-Defined Heterogeneous Vehicular Networks

4.1. Architecture Design for SDHVNet

The SDN paradigm, although primarily conceived for the management and orchestration of
conventional data centres, has recently gained the interest of academia and industry. SDN de-couples
the data plane and the control plane, and the network intelligence is forwarded to a centralized SDN
controller in a move aimed at making simplified, yet intelligent networking decisions. SDN yields
a number of benefits to a network’s management, including, but not limited to, reprogrammability,
agility, scalability, elasticity and flexibility [41]. However, it is also pertinent to mention that unlike
traditional networks, which are administered via a single point of network management, VANETs tend to
possess very high mobilities and are quite distributive in their nature. Since the centralized controller
in the SDN-based HetVNets plays a critical coordination role with the highly dynamic vehicles and
numerous radio access technologies and should it become unresponsive or unavailable, this may
transform into a single point of network failure, thereby seriously undermining the benefits of SDN,
and could potentially lead to fatal road incidents. Therefore, a distributed networking architecture
in addition to centralized governance is indispensable for ensuring the reliability of SDHVNets.
A topological architecture of our proposed SDHVNet is depicted in Figure 4.
It can be observed that vehicles tend to rely primaily on the vehicular clouds 1 or localized

2 3
intelligence (roadside cloudlets ), and centralized intelligence is only invoked once the compute
and storage resources at the localized level become inadequate. As is evident from Figure 4, vehicles
tend to traverse in the form of vehicular clouds. A vehicular cloud (also referred to as a micro cloud or
vehicular platoon) is a group of vehicles, just like the cluster in wireless sensor networks, wherein only
the cluster head is responsible for communicating the entire cluster’s status to the localized and/or
global management entities. This, in turn, assists in minimizing the excessive network management
overhead on the backhaul and ensures that the routing or other similar networking decisions could
be carried out in almost real-time with ultra-low end-to-end delay. Furthermore, vehicles that do not
wish to become a part of the vehicular cloud traverse independently (although not recommended) and
thus directly communicate with the local and/or global management entities.
Some of these vehicles possess selfish behaviour, i.e., they do not interact with other vehicles
and even do not relay other vehicles’ messages with the aim to conserve their resources for satisfying
personal objectives. Provided that the number of selfish vehicles in a network increases beyond a
particular threshold, localized intelligence ensures introducing certain incentive-based mechanisms
that could entice selfish vehicles to participate interactively in the network by becoming a part of the
optimal vehicular cloud. Such incentives may include, but are not limited to, enhancing the reputation
(i.e., a metric for evaluating the trust) of a vehicle within the network, access to higher bandwidths,
discounts on certain network services, etc. Nevertheless, such incentives are kept within a reasonable
limit so that these vehicles, after enjoying the perks, do not hibernate in the selfish mode once again,
but rather strive for more and more incentives over time. Game theory-based approaches are generally
utilized for such purposes.
Future Internet 2019, 11, 70 10 of 17

Centralized Cloud Central Compute

(Remote Cloud) & Storage

User Agent for Vehicles

V1 V2 V3 V4 ... Centralized 3
SDN Controller Intelligence
Unified Resource Abstraction
(Bandwidth, Time, and Location)

Localized
Roadside Cloudlet can also be referred to as
Edge Cloud/Node, Fog Cloud, or Local Cloud

2
Intelligence
Local Compute Roadside Cloudlet Roadside Cloudlet Local Compute
& Storage (LTE) (DSRC) & Storage

Base
Station I2I Communication Access
Point

V2I V2I
Communication Communication

V2V V2V
Vehicular Cloud Communication Communication Vehicular Cloud
(Micro Cloud) (Micro Cloud) 1

Figure 4. A topological architecture of software-defined heterogeneous vehicular network (SDHVNet).

Moreover, a proposed logical architecture of SDHVNet is depicted in Figure 5. As can be seen, the
network infrastructure plane (i.e., data plane) encompasses both vehicles and vehicular users, roadside
infrastructure, i.e., access points and base stations of diverse heterogeneous radio access technologies,
traffic lights and vulnerable road pedestrians. V2V, V2I and V2P communication take place at the data
plane. Moreover, the southbound application programming interface (API) facilitates communication
between the network infrastructure plane and the control plane. OpenFlow is usually one of the most
commonly used southbound APIs. Nevertheless, OpenFlow needs to be considerably enhanced in
order to meet the challenges of dynamic vehicular networking environments. The control plane being
a software platform is responsible for the management of networking functions virtualized from the
network infrastructure plane. It thus collects and maintains the status of all SDN switches, creates and
retains an up-to-date networking topology and accommodates an up-to-date frequency manager in
order to determine the frequency of a requested vehicular application and service (or any other content)
along with the particular duration it has been requested. Subsequently, the cache manager ensures an
intelligent edge-based caching by employing dynamic cache management policies and cache eviction
strategies. Handover decision manager guarantees that the vehicles remain seamlessly connected to
the optimal radio access technology in an always best connected mode for satisfying the bandwidth and
stringent latency requirements of safety-critical vehicular applications and concurrently preserves
precious network resources by mitigating handover failures and unnecessary handovers.
Trajectory prediction is one of the key components of the control plane and primarily forecasts
and updates the anticipated trajectories of the SDN switches. Stationery switches can easily be reached
via a reliable connection. However, the real challenge is associated with the mobile switches. Hence,
vehicles that are associated with the roadside cloudlets could be easily accessed via the control plane.
However, vehicles that are temporarily disconnected need considerable attention: (a) trajectories of
public transport are generally fixed, and as such, they could be reached via their fixed time schedules;
and (b) connected vehicles are anticipated to be equipped with navigational systems, and drivers are
generally expected to traverse along the navigational trajectory, so these navigational routes could be
considered as the vehicles’ trajectory for traversing through the network. Lastly, the applications plane
Future Internet 2019, 11, 70 11 of 17

offers a set of vehicular applications and services indispensable for formulating a next-generation
seamless, ubiquitous and undifferentiated ITS platform.

Applications Plane Quality-of-Service Augmented Reality (See Through Cars) Security

Network Slicing

Vehicular Safety and Non-Safety (i.e., Infotainment) Applications Quality-of-Experience

Northbound APIs
(i.e., Customized APIs)

Resource Allocator Topology Manager Graph Generation Service Mapping

Control Plane

Handover Decision Manager Routing Flow Tables

(Handover Necessity Estimation, Target Selection, Triggering Condition Estimation)

Event Manager Trajectory Prediction Frequency Manager Cache Manager

Southbound APIs
(i.e., Open Flow)
Infrastructure Plane

Roadside Infrastructure
(Data Plane)

Vehicles (Heterogeneous Base Stations and Access Points, i.e., Pedestrians

Network

(& Vehicular Users) 4G LTE, Wi Fi, WiMAX, mmWave; Traffic Lights)

V2V, V2I/V2N, and V2P Communication

Figure 5. The logical architecture of SDHVNet.

4.2. Architectural Challenges

Apart from the aforementioned architectural features of a SDHVNet, there exist several design
challenges that significantly hamper its service performance and implementation in highly dynamic
vehicular environments. This subsection highlights some of these design challenges and their
proposed solutions.

4.2.1. Seamless, Ubiquitous and Undifferentiated Network Connectivity

The prime intent of heterogeneous vehicular networking is to guarantee a seamless, ubiquitous
and undifferentiated network connectivity to ensure the stringent quality-of-service (QoS) and QoE of
diverse vehicular safety and non-safety applications and vehicular users, respectively. Undoubtedly,
both vehicles and vehicular users should always be connected to the optimal radio access technologies,
which could ensure ultra-low end-to-end delay (latency), higher bandwidth, enhanced data rates and
that also in a cost-efficacious manner. However, the heterogeneity of diverse radio access technologies
is an arduous task to tackle, and therefore, intelligent vertical handover decisions are required to ensure
seamless mobility. In a heterogeneous vehicular networking environment, vehicles either traverse
along the geographical regions of overlapping radio access technologies or different geographical
regions with distinct radio access technologies. Moreover, owing to the highly dynamic behaviour of
vehicles, they are expected to perform frequent handovers. Nevertheless, too frequent handovers result
in the wastage of precious network resources and need to be mitigated. Furthermore, for any vertical
handover to transpire successfully, three vertical handover decision mechanisms should be executed
with a minimal possible delay: (a) handover necessity estimation—determining whether a particular
handover is essential to an available network (or networks); (b) handover target selection—opting for the
best network out of the available networks; and (c) handover-triggering condition estimation—determining
the precise time instance to trigger handover to the selected network.
Since the centralized SDN controller in the heterogeneous network possesses a bird’s eye view of
the entire underlying architecture, it could help to meet the seamless, ubiquitous and undifferentiated
network connectivity. This is illustrated in Figure 4, wherein the abstraction of physical radio
resources of diverse radio access technologies in terms of their bandwidth, time and location is suggested.
Future Internet 2019, 11, 70 12 of 17

This abstraction refers to the bandwidth resources that are available for a vehicular application at a
particular time and location via each of the radio access technologies in the current and anticipated
trajectory of the vehicles. Since the SDN controller has global knowledge of the available physical
radio resources of each radio access technology’s BS/AP along the vehicle’s anticipated travelling
direction, intelligent vertical handover schemes can be accordingly employed for switching purposes.

4.2.2. Heterogeneous Multi-Hop Routing

Vehicles typically disseminate safety-critical information to other vehicles in their immediate
vicinity via multi-hop V2V communication or by relaying the messages through roadside units, each
possessing a different radio access technology. Nevertheless, these safety-critical messages may get
lost if the serving radio access technology fails or next hop becomes unavailable (especially in sparse
traffic conditions), thus resulting in a communication breakdown and wastage of precious network
resources, which may lead to fatal accidents on the roads. Furthermore, some of these radio access
technologies are comparatively more expensive than the others, i.e., LTE is fairly expensive in contrast
to WiFi and DSRC. Thus, a highly reliable and cost-efficacious communication via multi-hop routing is
indispensable in a VANET context. It is also crucial in restoring the network connectivity, especially in
case the serving radio access technology fails, but an overlapping radio access technology is accessible.
Likewise, in the case of vehicles outside the coverage range of serving roadside units, the network
packets could still be shared (with them) through multi-hop V2V communication by vehicles associated
with the roadside units, and centralized SDN controllers with a global view of the underlying network
can map the shortest, yet optimal multi-hop routes for the said purpose.
Moreover, SDHVNets via their characteristics of reconfigurabile and reprogrammable networking
infrastructure can reduce the service costs either related to downloading of a particular application or
upgrading of a particular service. Let us assume that 50 vehicles are traversing through a particular
geographical region with only LTE coverage and intend to perform service upgrades. If the packet
size is 20 MB with the cost of service upgrade as US$ 0.15 per MB, then the entire service upgrade cost
would be 50 × 20 × 0.15 = 150$. SDHVNets, on the other hand, could facilitate cooperative sharing by
enabling 1/3 of the vehicles to perform service upgrades via LTE and the remaining 2/3 to request
the same content via V2V communication, thereby cutting down the cost to 50 × 20 × 0.15 × 1/3 +
0 × 2/3 = 50$.

4.2.3. Broadcast Storm Mitigation and Network Slicing

The sheer increase in the availability of onboard sensors and next-generation communication
platforms facilitate vehicles in disseminating safety-critical messages to other vehicles and vulnerable
road pedestrians in their immediate vicinity. Such safety messages are extremely critical in nature and
typically include, but are not limited to, emergency vehicle warnings, forward collision warnings, blind
intersection warnings, vulnerable pedestrian warnings, blind curve warnings and queue warnings.
However, disseminating of these packets in a concurrent manner or to vehicles not requiring the same
results in packet collision, choking of the entire network and hence the packet delivery timelines could
be considerably delayed, which within the context of vehicular networks, may lead to a number of
grave consequences. This phenomenon is referred to as broadcast storming where a sheer amount
of traffic is broadcast, in turn consuming the precious network resources and leaving behind fewer
resources to transport normal traffic. Broadcast storm could also be triggered by a malicious entity,
and the security of the network is also crucial in order to ensure that such entities are not allowed to
penetrate the network in the first instance, but if they do so, appropriate recovery mechanisms should
be in place to track and subsequently eradicate them from the network.
However, a broadcast storm could be resolved by appropriately slicing the network. Network
slicing is a technique whereby multiple tenants are isolated into distinct groups to improve the network
efficiency significantly. This is illustrated via a general scenario depicted in Figure 6. The police vehicle
P and ambulance A can broadcast messages to vehicles on both sides of the road. However, it is
Future Internet 2019, 11, 70 13 of 17

unnecessary for the vehicle P to broadcast messages to vehicles V3 , V4 and A, and the same is true
for vehicle A, which does not need to broadcast messages to vehicles P, V1 and V2 . The localized
SDN controllers could therefore slice the network with respect to the driving directions of vehicles
in the network. Thus, the vehicles would only broadcast packets to other vehicles travelling in their
respective direction or their anticipated travelling trajectory. SDN-based network slicing is perhaps
easy to configure, primarily owing to the software nature of the SDN controllers, is extremely beneficial
within a dynamic vehicular context and ensures ultra-reliable and low-latency communication.

Police P V1 V2 P V1 V2

Network Slicing

V3 V4 A V3 V4 A Ambulance

Driving Directions
Non-desirable Communication Links

Figure 6. Depicting broadcast storm and network slicing in a vehicular networking context.

4.2.4. Highly Dynamic and Distributed Behaviour of Vehicles

One of the significant challenges for SDHVNets is the highly dynamic and distributed behaviour
of vehicles, which makes it extremely difficult for the SDN control plane to maintain the run-time
positions of the vehicles and their anticipated travelling trajectories. This, therefore, leads to network
management overhead and a substantial amount of end-to-end delay for safety-critical and non-safety
vehicular applications. Undoubtedly, the dynamic mobility and the distributed behaviour of vehicles
are in fact the root cause for all the vehicular networking challenges and demands careful attention.
Furthermore, it is indispensable to disseminate network packets depending on the geographical
position of vehicles instead of their IP addresses, and highly intelligent and efficient localization and
trajectory prediction mechanisms need to be designed in order to tackle such a challenge. This requires
that the intelligence is passed to the edge of the network. Furthermore, a number of localization
techniques have been proposed in the research literature for mobile ad hoc networks, and the same
could be explored and subsequently optimized for SDHVNets.

4.2.5. Mobility-Aware Edge Caching

Another significant challenge in SDHVNets is to formulate an optimal edge caching policy, i.e., for a
given anticipated vehicle (or vehicular user) demand, it is imperative to determine which vehicular
applications, services and/or content should be placed in each edge cache so as to minimize the
average delay for such requests. If such or similar requests are not being catered to by the edge-based
caches, fetching them from the remote back-end servers would induce a significantly larger delay,
which becomes extremely critical especially in the context of vehicular safety applications. Since the
size of the edge caches is considerably smaller in contrast to the global caches (i.e., local caches at
most store 10−3 or 10−4 of the global cache content), it is quite essential to cache the right content
at the right time and then to flush it out so as to create storage space for the next popular content.
One possible way is to devise an age threshold scheme that caches all content requested for more than a
particular threshold τ, where τ is the content age. Content popularity could also be ascertained by
the Zipf distribution which implies that the collection frequency decreases quite rapidly with rank and
could be mathematically formulated as c f i ∝ 1/i or c f i = cik .
Several researchers in academia and industry have already proposed a number of cache management
policies, including, but not limited to, leave copy down, leave copy elsewhere, randomly copy one,
Future Internet 2019, 11, 70 14 of 17

probabilistic caching, latency-aware caching, congestion-aware caching and search and PopCache.
Furthermore, cache evictions strategies are indispensable as they determine which entries need to be
evicted from the cache in order to create sufficient space for the new entries and typically include
first-in-first-out, least recently used, least frequently used and RANDOM schemes. Nevertheless, since
vehicles traverse at very high speeds and content popularity subsequently changes at a dynamic pace
as well, it is quite difficult to estimate the content popularity at any given time and location on an
instantaneous basis, and therefore, intelligent dynamic edge-based caching algorithms need to be
devised in this regard. In SDHVNets, the SDN controller possesses sufficient knowledge of a vehicle’s
serving edge node (EN) and the time it takes to traverse through the coverage of a respective EN
along with the anticipated trajectories and the sequence of ENs in the anticipated trajectories of the
vehicles. This thus facilitates the SDN controller to deploy the requisite content in advance on ENs in
the anticipated trajectories of the vehicles. Furthermore, it is recommended that the content should be
stored on the ENs where the vehicles have a real chance to acquire them, i.e., on slow-moving traffic
regions or congested road intersections. Thus, intelligent mobility-aware edge caching architectures
could ensure ultra-reliable and low-latency communication, in turn not only meeting the stringent
QoS of diverse vehicular safety-critical and non-safety applications, but also guaranteeing the QoE of
the vehicular users.

4.2.6. Security
Security is one of the critical concerns in a vehicular networking environment. Over the years,
a number of security solutions have been envisaged for the VANETs, which primarily relied on the
conventional cryptographic schemes utilizing public key infrastructures and certificates. Nevertheless,
cryptographic-based solutions are not feasible for vehicular networks since vehicles are highly dynamic
in nature and are distributed throughout the network, the availability of a networking infrastructure
cannot be guaranteed at all times, and traditional cryptography-based solutions are also vulnerable
to insider attacks. Hence, trust has been recently introduced as an alternative for ensuring security
in vehicular networks. In trust-based schemes, vehicles communicate and disseminate safety-critical
messages with other vehicles based on trust (i.e., the confidence of one vehicle on the other) and
constitute both direct trust and indirect trust. Direct trust is a vehicle’s direct observation about the
target vehicle, whereas indirect trust is computed by seeking recommendations from the one-hop
neighbouring vehicles in the vicinity of the target vehicle. It is pertinent to mention that each one-hop
neighbour that furnishes its recommendation has a different context (both conditions and capabilities),
and thus, its recommendation segment should be weighted accordingly. Since the localized controllers
have precise knowledge of the vehicles in their coverage area, they can act as a local trust management
authority to weigh the individual recommendations and then aggregate them to obtain a trust segment.
Moreover, once the trust value of a particular vehicle falls below a particular threshold, the localized
controller can term it as malicious and ensure its elimination from the network. It can also intimate
the same to the globalized controller for broadcasting this message to other roadside cloudlets and
vehicular clouds to ensure that such malicious vehicles do not later become part of any network.

5. Conclusions and Future Directions

Conventional vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are capable of facilitating vehicle-to-vehicle
(V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications. Nevertheless, such VANETs have several
inherent shortcomings, including, but not limited to, lower bandwidths, higher end-to-end delays
and unbalanced traffic flows. To overcome such issues, in this article, we propose a highly intelligent,
robust and performant next-generation heterogeneous networking architecture for ensuring rapid
network innovation to meet the stringent performance requirements of diverse safety-critical vehicular
applications. Our proposed SDHVNet architecture offers an abstraction of network entities as SDN
switches, thus mitigating the inflexibility in the deployment of heterogeneous radio access technologies,
and facilitates an efficient orchestration of the network resources. This, in turn, addresses key issues
Future Internet 2019, 11, 70 15 of 17

pertaining to vehicular communication, i.e., guaranteeing ultra-low end-to-end delay for safety-critical
vehicular applications, intelligent caching at the network edge, broadcast storm mitigation via efficient
slicing of the network, etc.
A considerable number of architectural design issues still need to be investigated. The sheer
number of sensors onboard connected vehicles generates a massive amount of data, whose real-time
analysis is indispensable in order to ensure a reliable analysis of the traffic conditions on the road,
precise behaviour of vehicles and prediction of traffic vis-á-vis its density and throughput per hour,
per lane. Therefore, vehicle-to-cloud communication should augment the conventional V2V and V2I
communication for such a highly dynamic and distributed networking environment. Furthermore,
the deployment of SDN controllers needs to be handled with caution since passing all intelligence to one
centralized controller would not only result in a significant amount of network management overhead,
but could also result in a single point of network failure. Therefore, intelligence needs to be passed
within the network, and especially at the network edge. However, it is pertinent to mention that placing
an SDN controller in every roadside cloudlet would result in frequent handovers, which subsequently
would lead to wastage of precious network resources. Hence, appropriate SDN placement schemes
need to be investigated. Scalability is also a concern in SDN-based heterogeneous vehicular networks
since there are a huge number of vehicles in dense vehicular networking environments, and tracking
their run-time positions is not only an arduous task to tackle, but also results in a massive amount
of management overhead. Structured vs. non-structured and clustered vs. non-clustered routing
protocols should be devised in order to address the scalability issues.

Author Contributions: Conceptualization, A.M., W.E.Z. and Q.Z.S.; investigation, A.M.; methodology, A.M.;
supervision, W.E.Z. and Q.Z.S.; validation, A.M., W.E.Z. and Q.Z.S.; writing, original draft, A.M.; writing, review
and editing, W.E.Z. and Q.Z.S.
Funding: The corresponding author sincerely acknowledges the generous support of the Government of the
Commonwealth of Australia for funding the research at hand via its ‘International Research Training Program
(Allocation No. 2017560)’.
Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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