SDN-Enabled Adaptive Broadcast Timer for Data Dissemination in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

This paper presents an adaptive broadcast interval for data dissemination for an infrastructure-to-vehicle (I2V) environment. The roadside units (RSUs) disseminate the data to the vehicles after a specified broadcast time interval. Time interval tuning for the data dissemination is one of the parameters used to determine the effectiveness of the broadcast time interval at RSU for safety and infotainment message dissemination to the vehicles under a particular RSU coverage. We formulated the problem of computing an optimal broadcast time interval to maximize the service ratio, reducing the duplicate message overhead. The proposed scheme uses the software-defined network (SDN) architecture having OpenFlow-enabled RSUs and SDN controllers. Based on the global view of traffic-related information, the proposed SDN controller computes the broadcast time interval for data dissemination among the vehicles. We used the NS-3 simulator to evaluate the proposed scheme's performance by generating a real scenario of VANET traffic using SUMO. Simulation results show that the proposed SDN-based scheme increases the average service ratio by 15-20% and reduces duplicate message overhead by 7-10% in comparison to the other existing state-of-the-art schemes.