SDN Enabled 5G-VANET: Adaptive Vehicle Clustering and Beamformed Transmission for Aggregated Traffic

With the anticipated arrival of autonomous vehicles, supporting vehicle generated data traffic due to the dramatically increased use of in-vehicle mobile Internet access will become extremely challenging in 5G-based vehicular networks. This is mainly due to the high mobility of vehicles on the road and the high complexity of 5G HetNets. In order to support the increasing traffic and improve Het-Net management, an SDN enabled 5G VANET is proposed in this article, where neighboring vehicles are clustered adaptively according to real-time road conditions using SDN's global information gathering and network control capabilities. With proposed dual cluster head design and dynamic beamforming coverage, both trunk link communication quality and network robustness of vehicle clusters are significantly enhanced. Furthermore, an adaptive transmission scheme with selective modulation and power control is proposed to improve the capacity of the trunk link between the cluster head and base station. With cooperative communication between the mobile gateway candidates, the latency of traffic aggregation and distribution is also reduced. Computer simulation results show that the proposed design substantially improved 5G users' bit error rate and trunk link throughput rate.