SDN Based Handover Management For a Tele-Operated Driving Use Case

Tele-operated driving is a transition phase to the deployment of fully autonomous cars. Vehicles are supposed to communicate with a tele-operation station in order to exchange surrounding videos and traffic information. This communication is achieved through a vehicular network, and it requires low latency and high reliability. To this end, the mobility management should be studied carefully. This paper devises a mobility management scheme for a tele-operated driving use case based on the Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm. The proposed scheme provides handover anticipation in order to guarantee a low-latency and a seamless mobility. During the anticipation phase, the target network is selected relying on a specific sigmoid utility function and game theory, aiming at fulfilling user satisfaction and achieving load balancing. Once the selection is finalized, a routing strategy is proposed in order to reduce control signaling overhead and network congestion. Soft handover execution is performed seamlessly using two interfaces of the vehicle simultaneously. Performance analysis shows that our approach provides several improvements in terms of network load alleviation, and it reduces handover delays and losses.