A Distributed Topology Discovery Protocol for Software-Defined Vehicular Networks

Software-defined Vehicular Networks (SDVNs) have been vital for various radio access technologies to support the massive data load of many applications and services. That includes traffic and infotainment applications, as well as network management and routing services, among others. SDVNs elevates the constraint of static hardware-based network devices to programmable units and provide a global view of the network's status and the standard interface between diverse technologies. However, collecting and maintaining the network's information requires a robust discovery protocol to handle vehicles' rapid movement and increased network density. In this paper, we propose an efficient topology discovery protocol for software-defined vehicular networks that improve the discovery performance in terms of overhead and time-complexity by utilizing nodes closeness centrality scores. The proposed protocol is compared to benchmark discovery protocols using Ottawa city urban environment and generated vehicles' mobility.