2016

2016 IEEE
IEEE International
International Conference
Conference on
on Cloud
Cloud Engineering
Engineering Workshops
Workshop

DeVANET: Decentralized Software-Defined VANET Architecture

Afza Kazmi, Muazzam A. Khan, M. Usman Akram

Department of Computer Engineering
NUST, College of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering, Rawalpindi
National University of Sciences and Technology, H12 Islamabad Pakistan
afzakazmi@gmail.com, muazzamak@ce.ceme.edu.pk,usmakram@gmail.com

Abstract— Vehicular adhoc networks come out to be a
promising solution for ensuring traffic and road safety
on highways. However this area induces communication
challenges such as topology dynamics, and connectivity
losses. Today's Vanet demand a sound planning to
make architectural level decisions. Integrating Vanet
with emerging Software defined Networking brings
ground-breaking networking innovation. Recent
researches in SDN based Vanet are useful but their
performance goals drops in large scale VANETs. In
this research we are going to exploit SDN planes by
partitioning Vanet to work in distributed manner. The
proposed architecture is tested on VEINS testbed which
provides interactive environment to perform road
traffic simulations. Simulation results show an increase
in performance gains as compared to traditional Vanet
architectures.
Key words: Vanet; SDN; Architecture
I. INTRODUCTION
In the recent age of technological uplift the worth of
VANET (Vehicular adhoc network) is increasing day
by day. VANET provides the applications and
services such as traffic monitoring, context aware
infotainment and road safety applications. Each
application entails specific routing schemes,
protocols usage and quality of service requirements
such as bandwidth usage, data rate and latency. Our
area of research focuses on traffic road safety using
intelligent transportation system (ITS) for accident
prevention.
VANETs are considered rigid in nature. They are
difficult to design and deploy due to unbalanced flow
of traffic and network underutilization. VANET
management is arduous because of highly dynamic
topology and unreliable connectivity. Due to adhoc
nature of the network, nodes are sparsely distributed
at geographically distant locations that often results
in scalability issues. Existing VANET architectures
locks hardware and software details at node level.
Each vehicle node holds control and data tiers.
Generally VANET are designed from two
standpoints: domain and network experts [1]. Domain
experts are the one who are concerned with
infrastructure development and maintenance. Their
activities include data forwarding at node level. On
the contrary Network experts are concerned with
control operations such as routing and QoS control.
Since the network intelligence and infrastructure
details both reside in a single node, hence it becomes
difficult for the experts to comprehend the network
requirements. SDN (Software defined networking)
bridges such gaps by separating concerns in the form
of data and control plane [2]. The main aim of SDN
is to extract the intelligence out of the network; in
this way the infrastructure is in the forwarding/Data
Plane (DP) and whole network intelligence is placed
in Control plane (CP).
A. Need of SDN in VANETs
The need of SDN in VANET system rises due to the
abstraction deficit and rigidity aspect. SDN programs
the behavior of the network in a centralized way.
Recent efforts extend SDN principals to WSN
(Wireless Sensor networks) and VANETs. A
centralized SDN controller manages the overall
network behavior. But SDN controller may fail
affecting the network throughput. Fall back
mechanism inside a vehicle is a good solution for the
temporary uphold of network communication
services [3]. But it requires SDN module inside each
vehicle which is impractical for large Vanets. We
have proposed a decentralized SDN approach in
which the CP is partitioned into multiple controllers
that reside on physically distributed machines. [4]
Each having domain specific knowledge of different
regions. The proposed architecture is initially
designed for safety related VANETs. The major
contributions of this article are manifold. In Section I
we have pinpointed the gaps in the existing VANET
and SDN approaches and examine the problem areas.

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$31.00 © 2016 IEEE 42
DOI 10.1109/IC2EW.2016.12
Section II discusses the state -of-the art researches
made in SDN and VANET. Section III provides the
proposed methodology. Section IV and V provides
illustrates the Experimental setup along with
simulation details.
B. Problem Description
Conventional vehicle communication modes are V2V
(vehicle-to-vehicle) and V2I (vehicle-to-interface).
V2V communication requires no infrastructure
support and is fast and cost effective. But this
communication lasts for few seconds if a vehicle
covers several kilometers in less time. Infrastructure
support in VANET divides the overall load of
network. RSUs (Road side units) authenticate the
incoming vehicles. This improves the network
efficiency up to some extent but programming the
network intelligence still remains unresolved. SDN
encapsulates whole network intelligence in a single
device “controller”. SD-VANET (Software defined
Vanet) leverages the network efficiency by
increasing throughput, latency, and reliability of the
network but when network size increases it becomes
difficult to manage the dynamically changing DP
requests. One of such significant factor is Scalability
in SD-Vanet. The main drawbacks and limitations of
SD-VANET are:-
x The Centralization of control in VANET gives
rise to resiliency concerns [5]. In case of
highways connecting multiple areas, network
needs to be partitioned as it becomes impractical
for a single controller to monitor the other
network devices. A backup controller inside each
vehicle may works [3], but the deployment of
controller in each device adds cost to the
network.
x SDN has to ensure high responsiveness of the CP
to dynamically changing communication
interactions [4].
II. LITERATURE WORK
Vanet based Systems and Architectures are diverse in
computing environment. Most of the existing ones
are application specific and supports selective
protocol suites. For different Vanet scenarios
different routing schemes are proposed [20,21]. For
better performance of Vanet in ITS environments
Multicasting routing schemes are preferred [22]. In
[6] an information centric approach is used to build
Vanet architecture. This framework enables the
43
development of distributed protocols using local
decision rules set. A similar and more generalized
context-aware architecture for VANETs [7] is
proposed which uses contexts (VANET application
requirements, protocols, mobility vectors etc.).
Standard communication architecture is developed by
WG-IEEE-802.11p known as WAVE [8] which is
deployed in many VANET safety related
applications. Several Vanet architectures are result of
integration of existing approaches. In [9] VANET-
WSN is such an example which helps to detect road
conditions and connect VANET segments.
Advancing towards more sophisticated and rapid
communication technologies in [10,11] LTE is
integrated with Vanet, in this work IEEE 802.11p
and 3G/LTE strengths are uplifted which shows
better performance as compared to decentralized
clustering based architectures. However many
challenges (QoS, Routing) are linked with Vanet
which are addressed in [12]. The research also
describes simulation setups that help in selecting the
best which is suited for our research. A hybrid
simulation tool Veins [13] provides a modular
environment to test new protocols and mobility
models of Vanet. SDN for Vanet is proposed in [3]
which describe different operational modes of SD-
Vanet. Similar work is done in [14] which
concatenate SD-Vanet with fog computing to handle
connectivity and latency issues in Vanet. Distributed
SDN approach in Vanet is novel. Much effort is
needed for Large Scale Vanet
III. PROPOSED STRATEGY
A. SD- VANET: Concepts and Architecture
Each SDN plane (Data, Control, and Application) is
assigned certain responsibilities and SDN rules to be
implemented. Set of the rules define how the
interconnecting bodies (switches, hosts) forwards the
data frames to the upper planes. Forwarding policies
and rules are defined by the “controller” that directs
these policies to DP elements (e.g. switches) using
open source protocol “OpenFlow”. SDN switches
maintain data forwarding rules in flow tables. SDN
architecture provides Programmable APIs. These
APIs allows different SDN layers to interact with
each other and enable the developers to build a
customizable network. The design and working of
each SDN Plane is described below:-
Control Plane: CP holds a diversification of
components, related functionalities and network
centric services. Generally CP is visualized as a
routing manager performing routing related activities.
This Plane is flexible to program and observes the
states of Boundary APIs. Network discovery and
topology changes are all controlled by the SDN
controller.
Data Plane: It contains dedicated hardware of the
network (RSUs, vehicles). RSU accepts and
processes the data packets from the network devices
and maintains a record in its Flow table.
Application Plane: It holds VANET management
tools and customized applications. Network
Virtualization and Vehicles authentication are some
examples. The overall Vanet performance is
determined by QoS Control which provides visual
results (graphs, analytical models) to the service
operators.
B. Design Requirements & Functionalities
x R4: Each DC sends its domain information (link
state, hosts presence, request actions) to RC
which is kept inside SDN repository.
x R5: DC communicates with RC in two scenarios
(i). When DC fails, and RC takes the charge. (ii).
When Network state changes E.g. faulty link or
Flow Table changes. (iii). When DC receives out
of domain information [5].
Proposed D-SDVanet architecture of is presented in
figure 2. Controllers are organized hierarchically.
The most frequent DP requests are handled by the
DC. In pre-initialized phase forwarding rules are
enforced by the RC. When a mismatched flow entry
takes place in RSU it is handled by the DC
consuming less processing time.
APPLICATION LAYER
Network virtualization QoS Control
Traffic Management Network Monitoring
Northbound Abstraction Layer (REST)
.
CONTROL LAYER

In this section we discuss the requirements of Network Functions Network Services

Decentralized SDVanet. The reason of requirements Routing Device Topology Forwarding
Algorithms Manager Management Manager
analysis is to examine the most challenging features
of Decentralized SDVANET architecture. Due to Resource Statistics Mobility Link
distant positions of both Controller and RSUs there is Scheduler Manager Management Discovery

high probability of delayed response. For safety

related Vanet applications time of response is the key
constraint. We are going to exploit the middle layer
that is the control plane of the model. Our aim is to
distribute the centralize intelligence into respective
local territories termed as “domains”. We are
implementing our proposed approach on a highway
connecting several regions (Domains). Each domain
has its own centralized controller called DC (domain
controller) [15]. The functional distribution is made
in such a way that core controller performs the most
specialized functions and the generalized functions
are placed inside domain controllers. In order to
support the development of the proposed architecture
it should meet the following key requirements:-
x R1: There should have a Stable Connection
between the Root Controller (RC) and Domain
Controller (DC).
x R2: SDN rules are reactively or proactively
imposed in the distributed CP.
x R3: RSUs perform mutual information sharing
and are connected via wireless links.
Southbound Abstraction Layer (E.g. OpenFlow)
DATA/FORWARDING LAYER
Network Devices Communication Interfaces
Vehicles/RSU 3G/LTE Wi-Fi /WiMAX WAVE
Figure 1: Software defined Vanet Architecture
C. Structure of Distributed SD-Vanet
DC provides domain oriented network services along
with Request Handling module. Request handling
module is designed to handle DP requests. It contains
Configurator. The Configurator is designated as CPU
which processes the DP requests in collaboration
with network services and carries out network
updates both at DP and CP .The overall activities of
these modules are captured and statistics of the
network are displayed on a console screen called
Monitor. The core components of decentralized
SDVanet are described below each domain module is
traced back to its respective module in Root
controller.

44
 It assigns addresses to the --
Root Controller
Routing Configurator network nodes and works with
Error
Handling Algorithms topology management module to
SDN Repository
osit build topology graph
Statistics Resource **Device
Device
ce registry
r g y
Manager Scheduler *Location
oca registry
g y
*Link states
E. Interaction Mechanisms
Path Forwarding
Computation Rules manager As we have mentioned before that there exists a
stable TCP/IP connection between distributed
Domain Controller
controllers. This minimizes the chances of failures
Domain Network services
Topology Obstacle Forwarding
and packet loss. However Vehicles communicate in
Flow
Management Scheduling Control manager
g purely adhoc mode using WSMP (Wave short
message protocol). There are two kinds of messages
Mobility Management Connectivity Management
used for network wide communication (1). Event
Domain request Handling
based Messages are used for particular happening
Status Manager Configurator Monitor E.g. when the mismatched flow entry arrives at RSU
it is directed to DC. (2). Periodical Messages are
Figure 2: Distributed Control Plane of D-SDVanet generated periodically E.g. Sending DC status
D. Operational Mode of D-SDVanet information or informing the vehicle nodes about the
road conditions. Initially DC and RSU communicate
The major aim of this research is to uplift the
to install necessary flow rules for each RSU of the
scalability of the network. This could be achieved by
domain. After this, network is in ready state to accept
enhancing the controller(s) capabilities and
DP requests from vehicle nodes. The incoming
optimizing the network management schemes. For
messages from vehicles are sent to processing
single domain SD-Vanet a single configurator
module inside the RSU which made transformations
performs the request handling mechanisms.
to be sent to controller as Ethernet Frame. The
Configurator for D-SDVanet performs address
sequence diagram is a depiction of the intermediary
assignments of its lower level network elements
layers coordination activities.
similarly configurator for SD-Vanet manages the WSMP TCP P2P
respective domain network topology. In the next
section we have investigated how network modules
communicate by sending packets over variant link
ARP(Request)
layer protocols.
ARP(Reply
TABLE I: Components of Distributed CP of D-SDVanet
Component Description Link with
SYN
RC
SYN+ACK
Keeps the information like RSU SDN
Time

Features
Status status, hosts availability, and Repository (Request)
Manager requests handled by RSU. Features (Reply)
Establishes the connection Path WSN
Connectivity between network nodes & computation PacketIn
Manager communicates with the mobility
management ACK
PakcetOut SetFlowEntries
Manages the incoming flows Forwarding
Flow from RC-DC and then to RSU. Rules Figure 3: Message Sequence chart for D-SDVanet
Scheduling Prioritizes the flow & manages Manager
the traffic flow of the network to IV. IMPLEMENTATION & RESULTS
achieve better QoS
It models the obstacles that try to -- We describe our simulation environment along with
Obstacle block the radio transmission. It the configurations and results. The proposed
control performs empirical calculations architecture is designed using OMNET++ and
to calculate path loss value of the
SUMO simulator [16, 17] both of the simulators are
on-going transmission
Mobility It captures the vehicle mobility Path integrated in VEINS (vehicular Network Simulator)
management information such as speed computation framework. This framework provides versatile

45
models for IVC simulation. SDN concept in Veins is
novel yet arduous. Since SDNs were primarily
designed for wired LANs/WANs, we have introduced
OpenFlow extension [19] in Veins.
A. Experimental Setup
We consider a symmetric scenario where the network
is deployed in a 3x6 Manhattan grid network in
which each cell occupies an area of (1k x 1k=1km2).
The grid structure of the road network is illustrated in
figure 4. Vehicle nodes travel on routes generated in
SUMO. The vehicle node and infrastructure have
IEEE 802.11p (WAVE) based interfaces.
Infrastructure is connected to the controller via
Ethernet Interfaces.
Figure 4: Traffic simulation of D-SDVanet in SUMO
B. Simulated Architectural Description
A prototype model of distributed SD-Vanet is built in
VEINS. Since the proposed system is hierarchical.
Parent module is D-SDVanet, child is SDVanet and
at the leaf is RSU module. Car interior depicts that
car holds less communication modules which shows
that this system has less deployment cost at user
level. In figure 5, the topmost module is the complete
network along with the modules that provide
communication facilities, Annotations provides a
canvas to implement the traffic simulation. Channel
control maintains the channel switching and related
tasks. Arrows specifies tasks. Arrows specifies the
modular arrangement.
C. Metrics
We have utilized the following metrics to analyze the
model quantitatively:-
Gain of Scalability: For a time interval ‘T’, the
number of vehicles served either via V2I or V2V
communication is termed as Gain of scalability.
46
Service Delay: It measures the waiting time of the
served DP requests. It is the duration when the
requests are sent to the time when it get
acknowledgments in this sequence RC→ DC→
RSU→ Vehicle. Along x-axis we have taken vehicle
density for any specific domain [18].
Figure 5: Hierarchical D-SDVanet
D. RESULTS
The results shown in the figure 6 are provided on the
basis of node density. It is obvious that with an
increase of vehicle density there is a decrease in
network performance and ultimately gain of
scalability reduces. Here we have discussed three
traffic scenarios (TF). The peak curve depicts that
SD-Vanet performs handles maximum DP requests
for a single domain containing 10 vehicles. In the 2nd
TF nd (domain count) is incremented for nc=1
(controller count).
30 TF1
Gain of Scalability (DP requests/T)
TF2-( nc=1,nd=2 )
25
TF3-( nc=2,nd=2 )
20
15
10
5
0
10 20 30 40
Traffic Scenario (vehicle density)
Figure 6: Gain of scalability vs. Node density
Now we see a drop as not all of the nodes are served.
In the 3rd TF our model is used for nd=2 and nc=2 ,
it better manages the Gain by serving adequate DP
requests its curve comes in middle which justifies
proposed model for multiple domains. For the Service
delay metric we have taken a domain network of size
(1k x 1k) m or simply a cell of Manhattan grid.
Figure 7 represents service delay with respect to
varying node density. Although there have
intermediate nodes (RSU, controllers) between
source and destination so it is obvious that a delay
will occur in receiving the reply from CP. This is
managed here by first serving the highly mobile
nodes or accident situation. This prioritization
optimally handles the DP requests.
35
30
Service Delay (Sec)
25
20
15
10
5
0 Organization",IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference
10 20
Node density
Figure 7: Service Delay vs. Node Density
V. CONCLUSION & FUTURE WORK
A descriptive modular architecture for distributed
SDN oriented Vanet architecture is proposed in this
research that helps to effectively manage the large
scale vehicle traffic in highway scenario. Our
research exploited the central plane of SD-Vanet to
distribute intelligence to respective domains and
helps to overcome performance overheads like
Scalability. The communication of inter-modular
elements is presented in the sequence chart. The
evaluation of proposed model is conducted on
VEINS test bed that validates the suitability of
network for highway scenario. In the future this work
is implemented in realistic highway environment
such as on motorways.
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