Seamless Handovers in Software-Defined Vehicular Fog Networks

The emergence of vehicular networks has allowed the development of a wide range of applications capable of transforming these networks, enhancing their efficiency, safety, and sustainability of transportation systems, including Internet of Vehicles (IoVs) and their cloud-based applications. The increasing demand for time-critical applications within vehicular networks makes Vehicular Fog Network (VFN) a promising paradigm for delivering computational resources and facilitating decision-making closer to vehicular entities. Recent research demonstrates that the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm has the potential to enhance VFN by optimizing resource and service management, leading to the concept of Software-Defined Vehicular Fog Networks (SDVFN). In this paper, we propose a mechanism that takes advantage of SDN features in order to anticipate OpenFlow forwarding rules in the SDVFN environment, selecting the next Road Side Unit Access Point (RSU-AP) based on its bearing and distance from the perspective of vehicles in an urban environment. The lack of a comprehensive simulation tool for SDVFNs led us to develop a framework to support the orchestration of applications in the proposed architecture as an additional important contribution of this research work. The developed framework allows investigation on seamless handovers in SDVFN, implementing the adaptability of datapaths using the SDN paradigm.