A Distributed Control Plane Architecture for Handover Management in MEC-enabled Vehicular Networks

Abstract

Enhanced vehicular communication is considered to be one of the emerging beyond 5G services with Ultra-reliable and Low-Latency Communications (URLLC) requirements. Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) is a promising paradigm that brings computational resources, storage and services closer to vehicles, providing low latency and high reliability. MEC servers have limited resources, and therefore given the vehicles' highly dynamic and mobile nature, developing effective MEC handover schemes, and mobility management is a challenge. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging network paradigm that provides intelligent centralized and programmatic network control for effective handover management in MEC-enabled vehicular networks. The varying wireless network conditions and MEC server resource availability means that the network state information must be frequently transmitted to the centralized SDN controller to optimize the vehicle's mobility and network performance. This poses a significant load on the centralized controller, resulting in delayed response to extensive service mobility requests from large-scale vehicular networks. Therefore, this paper explores various SDN control plane architectural approaches for handover management in MEC-enabled vehicular networks. We also provided preliminary results of the distributed control plane architecture, where multiple SDN controllers collaborate to perform effective MEC handovers in a vehicular network.