SDN-Based Resource Management for Autonomous Vehicular Networks: A Multi-Access Edge Computing Approach

Abstract: Enabling high-definition (HD)-map-assisted cooperative driving among autonomous vehicles (AVs) to improve the navigation safety faces technical challenges due to increased communication traffic volume for data dissemination and increased number of computing/storing tasks on AVs. In this article, a new architecture that combines multi-access edge computing (MEC) and software-defined networking (SDN) is proposed for flexible resource management and enhanced resource utilization. With MEC, the interworking of multiple wireless access technologies can be realized to exploit the diversity gain over a wide range of radio spectrum, and at the same time, computing/storing tasks of an AV are collaboratively processed by servers and other AVs. Moreover, by enabling SDN and network function virtualization (NFV) control modules at each cloud-computing and MEC server, an efficient resource allocation framework is proposed to enhance global resource sharing among different network infrastructures. A case study is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed resource allocation framework.