A proposal of SDN based vanet architecture and signalling application for urban traffic management systems

One of the main challenges for developed cities is vehicle traffic and its management. Because of physical structures and cross roads of urban intersections, traffic flows may cause time delay, congestion, traffic accidents and more fuel/time consumption. For these reasons, there are many studies on traffic management systems which are a part of smart city applications in both literature and practice. In recent years, it seems that VANET (Vehicular ad hoc networks) architecture has been preferred in these studies, which enables vehicles to easily communicate with each other or devices on the edge of the road and also to transfer the related traffic data to the center. On the other hand, there are many studies on a new network paradigm called SDN (software defined networks) that solves problems such as performance, programmability, scalability, security and management difficulties in today's traditional networks. Depending on all this, in this study, we will present an architectural proposal about how to use SDN and VANET network paradigms together in traffic management systems in order to use both existing intersection management system modules more adaptively and future traffic based services to be added in desired service quality without changing the communication infrastructure. Also in this study, a 3-stage fuzzy-decision tree model was proposed for traffic signalling by focusing environmental factors and activity information not only vehicle density unlike other signaling studies in literature. The proposed model also generates/sends a dynamic flow input to SDN agent vehicles and SDN agent RSU in intersection for making VANET routing protocols (AODV, DSDV) selection automatically. In order to measure the functionality of the SDN based VANET architecture and 3 stage fuzzy-decision tree model on it for the transmission infrastructure of the traffic management, performance tests were performed on different traffic and network scenarios on Adapazarı City Centre Model. SDN based VANET architecture was compared with traditional systems according to transmission infrastructure and also proposed 3-stage fuzzy-decision model was compared with signaling techiques in literature such as fixed-time signaling, Webster equation and ant colony algorithm. According to results obtained in the performance tests, the proposed signaling models and architectural structures have better performance about 12-14% in traffic singalling criteria and 30-35% in network criteria according to other signaling techniques.