Achieving Secure and Seamless IP Communications for Group-Oriented Software Defined Vehicular Networks

Supporting secure and efficient mobility management in heterogeneous vehicular networking is a challenge issue. Most of traditional mobility management schemes suffer from long handover delay and lack mobility support for roaming across various access networks. As a promising new network paradigm, software-defined networks (SDN)based vehicular networks enables flexible ubiquitous connection and realtime network management with the software controller. However, the existing works still cannot support the emerging group-oriented vehicular environment, such as platoon scenario. Especially, Internet Protocol security (IPsec) and Internet Key Exchange version 2 (IKEv2), which are considered to be used to secure IPv6 Network Mobility (NEMO), face challenge in terms of performance when implementing in the grouporiented vehicular environment. To address these issues, in this paper, a new SDN-enabled VANET-Cellular integrated network architecture is proposed by following the SDN concept, which is based on the OpenFlow (OF) protocol. Then, we introduce a unified secure and seamless IP communications framework for group-oriented heterogeneous vehicular environment. We try to address two major challenges: i. e., (1) how to securely and flexibly set up the platoon, and (2) how to control the handover signalling overload (mainly introduced by group access authentication and IPsec establishment), and reduce handover latency when a large number of platoon members need to securely access the Internet.