Improved Rule Installation for Real-Time Query Service in Software-Defined Internet of Vehicles

Abstract

Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has gained considerable attention from industry and academia due to the development of communication technology and smart city. However, a proprietary and closed way of operating hardware in network equipment slows down the progress of new service deployment and extension in IoV. Moreover, the tightly coupled control and data planes in traditional networks significantly increase the complexity and cost of network management. By proposing a novel architecture, i.e., software-defined IoV (SDIV), we adopt a software-defined network (SDN) architecture to address these problems by leveraging its separation of the control plane from the data one and a uniform way to configure heterogeneous switches. However, IoV characteristics introduce some great challenges in rule installation due to the limited size of flow tables at OpenFlow-enabled switches that are the main SDN component. It is necessary to build compact flow tables for IoV scalability. Accordingly, we develop a novel rule installation mechanism to reduce the number of rules for real-time query services in SDIV. We separate the wired data plane from the wireless one and use multicast addresses in the latter. We introduce a destination-driven model in the wired data plane to reduce the number of rules at switches. Experiments with a real data trace show that the developed approach significantly reduces the number of rules without degrading the performance of data transmissions for real-time query services in IoV.