Secure Separation of the Infrastructure in Software-defined Overlay-enabled Internet of Vehicles (IoV)

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is becoming increasingly popular in both academic communities and modern industrial ecosystems. The shared communication substrate of IoV networks with other communication networks, such as mobile networks and mobile data networks, can impose significant security risks on neglecting security upgrading of this infrastructure and the absence of a proper policy for selecting the key elements of the network can readily disrupt the Intelligent transportation system (ITS). Software-defined networking (SDN), with ITS intrinsic capabilities, can render IoV networks more secure and scalable. SDN provides advantages such as improved traffic control, smart routing, quality of service, and road-aware decision making. One effective SDN approach is to employ a coverage model. The overlay model enables the creation of a virtual network consisting of authorized nodes atop the physical network to realize the decoupling of the physical layer, which can be regarded as the first line of defense for network security. In this paper, an SDN overlay model for the IoV is proposed to enable a secure communication infrastructure. The model consists of establishing a virtual and geographically partitioned network over the underlying physical network, along with the creation of communication tunnels and encryption of information packets, thereby forming a multi-path mesh connectivity. Simulation results show that the proposed model can improve end-to-end delay, resource utilization, and average response times compared to both other SDN networking approaches and traditional models. The proposed model creates a suitable roadmap for improving security concerns in this field.