Soft-Defined Heterogeneous Vehicular Network: Architecture and Challenges

TL;DR

This paper proposes a soft-defined, multi-layer Cloud RAN architecture for heterogeneous vehicular networks, enhancing flexibility, efficiency, and QoS support in the evolving 5G landscape.

Contribution

It introduces a novel multi-layer Cloud RAN architecture and a high-level soft-defined HetVNET design to address current network limitations and support dynamic vehicular applications.

Findings

Feasibility of soft-defined HetVNET in 5G era

Enhanced resource utilization through multi-domain exploitation

Discussion of key challenges and potential solutions

Abstract

Heterogeneous Vehicular NETworks (HetVNETs) can meet various quality-of-service (QoS) requirements for intelligent transport system (ITS) services by integrating different access networks coherently. However, the current network architecture for HetVNET cannot efficiently deal with the increasing demands of rapidly changing network landscape. Thanks to the centralization and flexibility of the cloud radio access network (Cloud-RAN), soft-defined networking (SDN) can conveniently be applied to support the dynamic nature of future HetVNET functions and various applications while reducing the operating costs. In this paper, we first propose the multi-layer Cloud RAN architecture for implementing the new network, where the multi-domain resources can be exploited as needed for vehicle users. Then, the high-level design of soft-defined HetVNET is presented in detail. Finally, we briefly discuss key challenges and solutions for this new network, corroborating its feasibility in the emerging fifth-generation (5G) era.