Link stability based optimized routing framework for software defined vehicular networks

Abstract

The dynamic nature of vehicular networks imposes a lot of challenges in multihop data transmission as links are vulnerable in their existence due to associated mobility of vehicles. Thus, packets frequently find it difficult to get through to the destination due to the limited lifetimes of links. The conventional broadcasting based vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) routing protocols struggle to accurately analyze the link dynamicity due to the unavailability of global information and inefficiencies in their route discovering schemes. However, with the recently emerged software defined vehicular network (SDVN) paradigm, link stability can be better scrutinized pertaining to the availability of global network information. Thus, in this paper, we introduce an optimization based novel packet routing scheme with a source routing based flow instantiation (FI) operation for SDVN. The routing framework closely analyzes the stability of links in selecting the routes and the problem is formulated as a minimum cost capacitated flow problem. Furthermore, an incremental packet allocation scheme is proposed to solve the routing problem in a less time complexity. The objective is to find multiple shortest paths which are collectively stable enough to deliver a given number of packets. The FI scheme efficiently delivers and caches flow information in the required nodes with a reduced extent of communication with the control plane. With the help of realistic simulation, we show that the proposed routing framework excels in terms of the performance over the existing routing schemes of both SDVN and conventional VANET.