Cost-Efficient Heterogeneous Data Transmission in Software Defined Vehicular Networks

Vehicular networks have been regarded as the key enabling technology of the future smart vehicles. Existing vehicular communications mainly rely on a single network instance or utilize data offloading over two networks (e.g., IEEE 802.11p and cellular network). However, today's vehicular network implementations are highly heterogeneous. Conventional homogeneous communication and data offloading may not be able to satisfy the requirement of the emerging vehicular networking applications. In this research, we apply software defined network (SDN) to the heterogeneous vehicular networks to bridge the gap. With SDN, heterogeneous network resources can be managed with unified abstraction. Moreover, we propose an SDN-based wireless communication solution, which can schedule different network resources to minimize communication cost. The problem is formulated as an optimization problem, and two different solutions have been designed to adapt divergent application scenarios. We evaluate the proposed approaches using traffic traces. The effectiveness and efficiency are validated by the results.