SDCoR: Software Defined Cognitive Routing for Internet of Vehicles

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is a subapplication of the Internet of Things in the automotive field. Large amounts of sensor data require to be transferred in real-time. Most of the routing protocols are specifically targeted to specific situations in IoV. But communication environment of IoV usually changes in the space-time dimension. Unfortunately, the traditional vehicular networks cannot select the optimal routing policy when facing the dynamic environment, due to the lack of abilities of sensing the environment and learning the best strategy. Sensing and learning constitute two key steps of the cognition procedure. Thus, in this paper, we present a software defined cognitive network for IoV (SDCIV), in which reinforcement learning and software defined network technology are considered for IoV to achieve cognitive capability. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first one that can give the optimal routing policy adaptively through sensing and learning from the environment of IoV. We perform experiments on a real vehicular dataset to validate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed algorithm. Results show that our algorithm achieves better performance than several typical protocols in IoV. We also show the feasibility and effectiveness of our proposed SDCIV.