SDN-Based Edge Computing in Vehicular Communication Networks: A Survey of Existing Approaches

Improved communication performance in a vehicular communication network (VCN) is achieved by enabling additional computation and storage support at the level of edge, fog and cloud. Specifically, the edge/fog server location near to the vehicles enables improved networking performance, especially in terms of load balancing and end-to-end delay. Recently, Software Defined Networking (SDN) in general and SDN-based edge/fog computing in particular have been employed in the context of VCN, enabling that further communications performance improvements be achieved with the help of SDN-based fog/edge computing in the VCN (SDV-F). This paper surveys a large number of innovative approaches proposed for communications performance enhancement in the context of SDV-F and categorizes them based on different aspects, including Artificial Intelligence (AI) and security support. The advantages and limitations of the proposed approaches in each category are highlighted. Finally, various directions that can be considered as promising research avenues by the researchers in future are presented and discussed.