SDN enabled high performance multicast in vehicular networks

Software defined network empowers the creation of a flexible network architecture by abstracting flow control from individual devices to the network level. In this paper, we address the challenges in applying SDN to develop high-performance vehicular networks. We present SDVN, a new SDN based vehicular network architecture. It organizes the topology of the vehicular networks and utilizes vehicle trajectory prediction to mitigate the overhead of the SDN control and data plane communication. Moreover, we propose a multicast protocol over SDVN, as multicast is the foundation of many vehicular network applications. The protocol exploits the network topology information provided by SDVN to make far more efficient multicast scheduling decision. The multicast scheduling problem is formulated to minimize the communication cost with bounded delay constraint. A polynomial time approximation algorithm is proposed. We conduct extensive experiments using traffic traces. The evaluation shows that the SDVN based multicast protocol outperforms existing decentralized approaches.