Software-Defined Vehicular Networking

Dear Colleagues,

Over the past few years, considerable state-of-the-art advancements in the telecommunications and automotive sectors have empowered drivers with highly innovative communication and sensing capabilities, in turn paving the way for the next generation of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) which is indispensable for an efficient deployment of futuristic connected and autonomous vehicles. Nevertheless, the safety of both vehicular passengers and vulnerable pedestrians in the context of ITS is of paramount importance. In this aspect, sharing of timely safety-critical information and a seamless connectivity with the traffic management entities is extremely imperative not only for the purpose of collision mitigation but also for necessary guidance pertinent to the current and anticipated trajectories and their corresponding speeds for ensuring an efficacious traffic flow. Therefore, a secure and low-latent communication architecture is essential to satisfy the stringent performance requirements of safety-critical vehicular applications.

Although conventional vehicular ad hoc networks can offer a diverse range of safety and non-safety (infotainment) services, nevertheless, they suffer from inherent shortcomings, including but not limited to lower bandwidths, higher end-to-end delays, and an unbalanced traffic flow. Additionally, modern-day connected vehicles are being equipped with hundreds of sensors onboard, which has transformed vehicles into an ambient sensing platform, i.e., data collection device, thereby paving the way for the connected cars of the future. It is further anticipated that an average connected vehicle would be able to generate more than 5 TB of data for each hour of its driving. Hence, (a) tackling such a flood of data so that the meaningful information could be processed and accordingly utilized for vehicular safety applications in an efficient manner, (b) selecting appropriate radio access technologies so that the said meaningful information could be transmitted with high data rates and low end-to-end delay, and (c) determining where to carry out all of this processing (i.e., compute and storage), since if sent to the backhaul would not only increase the network management overhead but would also compromise the service level objectives of the safety-critical vehicular applications, is extremely imperative.

To address the above stated challenges, the notion of software-defined networking (SDN) is being extensively deployed for wireless networks, and as of late, the same has been investigated for vehicular networks by a number of researchers within academia and industry. This Special Issue, accordingly, welcomes original contributions to bring forth the state-of-the-art advancements in the subject landscape. Thus, both high-quality surveys and technical contributions are welcome for this Special Issue.

Topics include but are not limited to:

• Architectures for software-defined vehicular networks (SDVNs);
• Software-defined heterogeneous vehicular networks (SDHVNETs);
• Security aspects of software-defined vehicular networks;
• Dynamic controller placement strategies in software-defined vehicular networks;
• Machine learning/deep learning strategies for software-defined vehicular networks;
• Energy-efficient software-defined vehicular networks;
• Low latency in software-defined vehicular networks;
• Integration of SDN and vehicular cloud computing;
• Caching strategies in (5G-enabled) software-defined vehicular networks;
• Integration of SDN and ICN for vehicular networks;
• Crowd Collaborations for software-defined vehicular networks.

Prof. Dr. Michael Sheng
Dr. Adnan Mahmood
Guest Editors

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