On the Impact of SDN for Transmission Power Adaptation and FIB Population in NDN-VANETs

Vehicular communications suffer from intermittent connectivity due to sudden topology changes. Content retrieval is based on broadcasting and/or cellular infrastructure that allows vehicles to download or upload content. This paper investigates how Named Data Networking (NDN) in combination with Software Defined Networking (SDN) impacts vehicular communications. SDN is used to centralize network control by performing routing calculation and transmission range adaptation to improve the number of interconnected cars. NDN is used as the communication mechanism since a vehicle is not interested in where the content is located, but rather in what the content is. For improving communication we install multiple antennas in vehicles and Road Side Units along streets and study the impact on communication according to the number of installed antennas. Finally, SDN deployment allows us to use unicast transmissions for content retrieval. Our results show that the SDN controller is responsible for routing 5%-10% of the total requests existing in the vehicular network.