Software-Defined Management Model for Energy-Aware Vehicular Networks

This paper investigates the energy efficiency of Road Side Units (RSUs) by proposing a novel flow and energy management model in Software-Defined Networking (SDN)-based vehicular networks. In the considered scenario, high vehicular mobility and limited coverage area of RSUs cause a degradation in Quality of Experience (QoE) of vehicles and this significantly affects the quality of communication by decreasing the percentage of flow satisfied. In addition, the growth in energy consumption of RSUs leads to inefficient network management. Being inspired from SDN, a centralized controller can schedule RSUs by providing a fair share of network resources and reduce the total energy consumption of RSUs by switching on/off. More specifically, in this paper, the controller classifies to vehicles based on QoE and defines unsatisfactory vehicles. Then the controller estimates the right amount of power level of these vehicles to connect a new assigned RSU. In this manner, RSUs can be scheduled by switching on/off so that the growth in energy consumption of RSUs can be managed. The evaluations show that the proposed model provides a better flow satisfied and throughput by guaranteeing energy efficiency in SDN-based vehicular networks.