Ob-EID: Obstacle aware event information dissemination for SDN enabled vehicular network

Abstract

With rapid increase in traffic density in urban areas, the accident rate is also becoming a serious problem which results in traffic congestion, inconvenience and sometimes life loss. The rate of accidents can be minimized by sharing real-time event information among vehicles on the road through safety application. To realize the safety applications, it is paramount to disseminate event information in real-time through a reliable path which is extremely challenging due to unique vehicular characteristics. To ensure reliable path, there are majorly two critical issues: (i). It is very difficult to form the stable connections due to varying vehicular density and dynamic topology. (ii) the dynamic obstacles affect the signal intensity and hinder the communication between vehicles. Indeed, majority of dissemination schemes are based on distance and dissemination time only, while neglecting the effect of dynamic obstacles. Also, the localized traffic view is considered in such schemes lack in providing the real time vehicular dynamics and network status information. To overcome these issues, a Software Defined Network (SDN) based vehicular network model has been presented to ensure real time vehicular dynamics awareness in urban environment to share event information. For reliable event information dissemination, a heuristic based reliable path selection (HRPS) algorithm is proposed to disseminate event messages between a source and destination vehicle in real-time that will minimize the hindrance due to dynamic obstacles. The proposed algorithm selects a multi-modal path reliability function that depends on multiple routing metrics (connectivity, link reliability and obstacle impact probability) and selects the reliable path by optimizing the path reliability function. The proposed algorithm is simulated for varying urban traffic conditions to analyze its performance. The proposed algorithm shows packet delivery ratio between 90%–95% for varying vehicular density. The simulation results show the supremacy of proposed algorithm as compared to existing compared routing scheme. The proposed algorithm ensures real time event information dissemination for delay sensitive event information that minimizes the impact of dynamic obstacles.