Enhancing Security in Software-Defined Networking-Enabled Vehicular Networks

Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, we have witnessed a series of great efforts by researchers and industries towards efficient vehicular communication (also known as Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs), which include vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) message flows, supported by wireless access technology), which has considerably enhanced the development of the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). In this context, many vehicular networking applications (e.g., traffic control, collision avoidance, emergency warning, and free parking search) have been proposed, which range from safety-related applications to those aiming to provide convenience to passengers. Nevertheless, several features such as high mobility, frequent disconnections, the heterogeneity of applications, and increasing demand for scalability, flexibility, security, and reliability prevent the traditional vehicular networks from achieving their high performance. Furthermore, IP-based traditional networking, which is used in traditional vehicular networking architecture, is facing difficulties in deployment and network management with the growth of network devices and new mobile generations (e.g., 5G). Thus, Software Defined-Networking (SDN) appears as a promising solution for the future of different kind of networks, where its advantages in vehicular networks have already been proven. However, a number of challenges exist for a full-scale carrier network implementation of SDN-enabled vehicular networks (also known as Software Defined Vehicular Networking (SDVN)). One main challenge, which is only beginning to receive the attention it deserves, is that of security in SDVN.

This Special Issue aims to achieve the best of both worlds by introducing the structure and manageability of SDNs to the ad hoc world of VANETS. Just as annotations overlay satellite images to mark roads for easier planning, we research overlay SDN architectures over VANETs to coordinate the network traffic and ensure the communication guarantees that modern applications (such as cooperative intersection crossing) require. 

Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Architectures for software-defined vehicular networks (SDVNs);
• Security aspects of software-defined vehicular networks;
• Logically centralized and distributed strategies in software-defined vehicular networks;
• Machine learning strategies for software-defined vehicular networks;
• Low latency in software-defined vehicular networks;
• Integration of SDN and vehicular cloud computing.

Dr. Alireza Esfahani
Dr. Ayman Radwan
Dr. Javad Zarrin
Guest Editors

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• SDN
• vehicular networks
• privacy
• authentication
• cloud