Mobility Management through Scalable C/U-Plane Decoupling in IoV Networks

The concept of Internet-of-Vehicles (IoV) has been recently proposed to provide diverse vehicle control and on-board infotainment services while improving road safety and transportation intelligence. However, with the increased number of on-road vehicles and their mobility, conventional C/U-plane coupled architecture, which incurs high latency and low reliability, brings many challenges to the future deployment and operation of vehicular networks. Meanwhile, the tightly coupled network functions with operating hardware in network equipment also hinders new service provisioning in IoV. In order to address these issues, we propose a novel IoV framework by exploiting the potential of C/U-plane decoupled network architecture and Software Defined Networking technology. To satisfy the requirements of Ultra-Reliable and Low Latency Communications in IoV, a virtualized radio access network, an integrated caching-computing- analyzing module, a scalable hierarchical C/U-plane scheme, and the corresponding programmable protocol configuration are developed to support the proposed framework. Mobility management, especially C-plane handoff management, is then analyzed through a typical case study. The analysis and simulation results have demonstrated that the proposed framework can dramatically reduce latency and enhance reliability.