MM-SDVN: Efficient Mobility Management Scheme for Optimal Network Handover in Software-Defined Vehicular Network

Providing high-quality network services for vehicles is a challenge because of the fast-moving character of the vehicles. To address the shortcomings of traditional centralized and distributed mobility management schemes, such as triangular routing and poor scalability, many researchers use software-defined networking (SDN) to build mobility management schemes. However, most schemes rarely consider how to select the optimal base station for high-speed mobile vehicles in a dense network environment. Only using the received signal strength to select the base station tends to cause a ping-pong effect. Moreover, due to the high mobility of vehicles, the routing updates between vehicles and communication nodes will frequently occur, resulting in the significant consumption of network resources. In this article, we propose a mobility management scheme MM-SDVN based on SDN for vehicles. MM-SDVN uses deep Q-network to construct the optimal base station selection model, designs a multipath prefix matching algorithm to reduce the cost of route update, and realizes the seamless handover of vehicles in SDN intradomain and interdomain scenarios. The comprehensive experimental results show that MM-SDVN greatly improves the network service quality and handover performance of the vehicle. Compared to the other schemes, MM-SDVN improved vehicle throughput by 6.14%, 8.85%, and 10.34%, respectively.