Overcoming the bottlenecks in next-generation heterogeneous vehicular networks: Is SDN the optimal solution?

Due to recent technological advancements in the automotive sector and vehicular ad hoc networks, a growing interest in academia and industry could be seen for the next-generation Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has the potential to bring considerable advantages to the ITS domain primarily in terms of flexibility, scalability, and programmability in order to meet the performance requirements of diverse vehicular applications and services. It offers an efficient network management via a logically centralized controller possessing a comprehensive overview of the entire network. Nevertheless, SDN has been traditionally conceived for wired networks, and as such, could not be directly adopted for vehicular ad hoc networks due to numerous challenges and bottlenecks primarily owing to the highly dynamic and distributive behavior of vehicles. This paper, therefore, intends to establish that whether SDN can overcome these challenges and bottlenecks pertinent to vehicular ad hoc networks, and how traditional SDN architectures could be exploited in order to overcome these bottlenecks. Open research challenges and future directions have also been deliberated.