Software-Defined Networking for RSU Clouds in Support of the Internet of Vehicles

We propose a novel roadside unit (RSU) cloud, a vehicular cloud, as the operational backbone of the vehicle grid in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). The architecture of the proposed RSU cloud consists of traditional and specialized RSUs employing software-defined networking (SDN) to dynamically instantiate, replicate, and/or migrate services. We leverage the deep programmability of SDN to dynamically reconfigure the services hosted in the network and their data forwarding information to efficiently serve the underlying demand from the vehicle grid. We then present a detailed reconfiguration overhead analysis to reduce reconfigurations, which are costly for service providers. We use the reconfiguration cost analysis to design and formulate an integer linear programming (ILP) problem to model our novel RSU cloud resource management (CRM). We begin by solving for the Pareto optimal frontier (POF) of nondominated solutions, such that each solution is a configuration that minimizes either the number of service instances or the RSU cloud infrastructure delay, for a given average demand. Then, we design an efficient heuristic to minimize the reconfiguration costs. A fundamental contribution of our heuristic approach is the use of reinforcement learning to select configurations that minimize reconfiguration costs in the network over the long term. We perform reconfiguration cost analysis and compare the results of our CRM formulation and heuristic. We also show the reduction in reconfiguration costs when using reinforcement learning in comparison to a myopic approach. We show significant improvement in the reconfigurations costs and infrastructure delay when compared to purist service installations.