Exploring Software-Defined Network (SDN) for Seamless Handovers in Future Vehicular Networks

Abstract

With the rapid development of communication technology, vehicular communications systems are evolving to Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) by providing its wireless network services with increasing demand for high data rate. However, the highly mobile feature of vehicles and varying network densities in such communication systems pose challenges for the mobility management, including frequent handovers, increased delay and failure of the handover process. In this work, we propose an optimized mobility management approach using Software-Defined Network (SDN) in the future vehicular networks. In addition, we have proposed a new handover management mechanism. This new mechanism allows vehicles to select the most optimal network based on multi-criteria metrics. The simulation results show that the proposed approach performs well and achieves an improvement in terms of handover delay and handover failure rate, compared to existing approach.