The next-generation mobile cellular networks are dedicated to providing a valued and unique service experience by supporting ultrareliable and low-latency communication (URLLC), high throughput, and high availability. Multiaccess edge computing (MEC) is an emerging network solution that provides services and computing functions on edge nodes to provide users with a reliable and high-quality service experience. However, achieving satisfactory Quality of Service (QoS) for diverse service requests in a mobile environment is challenging because of the densely deployed yet resource-constrained MEC servers. A solution to ensure continued service quality is to migrate the services according to the mobility of users. However, in a highly mobile environment such as vehicular communications, this may result in a repeated relocation of services, incurring high operational costs and poor utilization of network resources. Moreover, each service has its own set of communication requirements, such as delay and bandwidth. Meeting these requirements in a highly dynamic and complex vehicular environment is an exacting challenge. Software-defined networking (SDN) concepts are leveraged in MEC to provide a unified control plane interface that performs effective network and service mobility management, to manage the heterogeneity of service requests within the resource-constrained MEC servers. We conducted various Proof-of-Concept (PoC) experiments in an overlapped vehicle-to-everything (V2X) networking environment to demonstrate the feasibility of our proposed system that ensures interconnection and federation among distributed MEC servers and mobile networks.

The demanding requirements of Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) applications, such as ultra-low latency, high-bandwidth, highly-reliable communication, intensive computation and near-real time data processing, raise outstanding challenges and opportunities for fifth generation (5G) systems. By allowing an operator to flexibly provide dedicated logical networks with (virtualized) functionalities over a common physical infrastructure, network slicing candidates itself as a prominent solution to support V2X over upcoming programmable and softwarized 5G systems in a business-agile manner. In this paper, a network slicing framework is proposed along with relevant building blocks and mechanisms to support V2X applications by flexibly orchestrating multi-access and edge-dominated 5G network infrastructures, especially with reference to roaming scenarios. Proof of concept experiments using the Mininet emulator showcase the viability and potential benefits of the proposed framework for cooperative driving use cases.

Vehicular networks are critical pieces in support of advanced intelligent transportation systems (ITS). These networks are formed by vehicles that can be connected to one another as well as to the infrastructure, and are subject to constant topology changes, disconnections, and data congestion. Each ITS application could have a different set of communication requirements, such as delay, bandwidth, and packet delivery ratio. Meeting these heterogeneous requirements in the complex dynamic environment of vehicular networks is a challenge. This paper develops a new framework for application-driven vehicular networks using 5G network slicing. We present the architecture of the proposed solution and design algorithms for heterogeneous traffic in a dynamic vehicular environment. Our simulations on realistic vehicular scenarios show significant improvements in network performance compared to the state-of-the-art approaches.

Software-Defined Wireless Networking (SDWN) is an emerging approach based on decoupling radio control functions from the radio data plane through programmatic interfaces. Despite diverse ongoing efforts to realize the vision of SDWN, many questions remain open from multiple perspectives such as means to rapid prototype and experiment candidate software solutions applicable to real-world deployments. To this end, emulation of SDWN has the potential to boost research and development efforts by re-using existing protocol and application stacks while mimicking the behavior of real wireless networks. In this article, we provide an in-depth discussion on that matter focusing on the Mininet-WiFi emulator design to fill a gap in the experimental platform space. We showcase the applicability of our emulator in an SDN wireless context by illustrating the support of a number of use cases aiming to address the question on how far we can go in realistic SDWN experiments, including comparisons with the results obtained in a wireless testbed. Finally, we discuss the ability to replay packet-level and radio signal traces captured in the real testbed toward a virtual yet realistic emulation environment in support of SDWN research.