V2V Data Offloading for Cellular Network Based on the Software Defined Network (SDN) Inside Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) Architecture

Data offloading plays an important role for the mobile data explosion problem that occurs in cellular networks. This paper proposed an idea and control scheme for offloading vehicular communication traffic in the cellular network to vehicle to vehicle (V2V) paths that can exist in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). A software-defined network (SDN) inside the mobile edge computing (MEC) architecture, which is abbreviated as the SDN_i-MEC server, is devised in this paper to tackle the complicated issues of VANET V2V offloading. Using the proposed SDN_i-MEC architecture, each vehicle reports its contextual information to the context database of the SDN_i-MEC server, and the SDN controller of the SDN_i-MEC server calculates whether there is a V2V path between the two vehicles that are currently communicating with each other through the cellular network. This proposed method: 1) uses each vehicle's context; 2) adopts a centralized management strategy for calculation and notification; and 3) tries to establish a VANET routing path for paired vehicles that are currently communicating with each other using a cellular network. The performance analysis for the proposed offloading control scheme based on the SDN_i-MEC server architecture shows that it has better throughput in both the cellular networking link and the V2V paths when the vehicle's density is in the middle.