# Dynamic Allocation of SDN Controllers in NFV-Based MEC for the Internet of Vehicles
Thus, MEC framework permits subscriber to offload tasks, faster communication of both data and control plane traffic, improving quality of experience by reducing latency, typically required for V2X scenarios [30; 31; 32; 33; 34]. MEC is mostly adopted for traditional IT cloud-based apps (e.g., video streaming, augmented reality), but it is still less commonly used for hosting network control plane functionalities. To the best of our knowledge, there is no work on dynamic resource allocation of SDN controllers for the Internet of Vehicles leveraging on an NFV-based MEC infrastructure. This way, Dynamic Software Defined Vehicular Multi-access Edge Computing - DSDVMEC is propose as an autonomic extension to the ETSI MEC reference architecture along with ETSI NFV. DSDVMEC aims at being flexible and scalable through dynamically reducing the wasting of MEC resources due to previous allocations of SDN controllers that either became idle or not fully utilized by current demand, but without compromising the quality of service of ongoing flows coming from access points. In this way, DSDVMEC providesthe IoV context with the ability to scale the infrastructure of controllers as VNFs according to the variability of vehicle's flow on the roads, without compromising latency due to the proximity of SDN controllers located at the MEC. In scenarios where RSUs belong to different operators, they could present communication limitations when not using SDN. In addition, the absence of SDN controllers makes it difficult to have a global view of the network. Besides, the absence of SDN controllers makes it challenging to have a global view of the network. Due to this scenario, the highly variable demands from vehicles may degrade system management and scalability. To this end, an autonomic SDN Allocator is proposed as a component of the DSDVMEC in order to implement a heuristic taking into account: (a) scalability support, (b) resource usage optimization, and (c) management complexity of allocated controllers. In summary, the main contributions of this article are as follows:  
* We propose DSDVMEC, an autonomic extension to the ETSI MEC-NFV architecture environment to dynamically allocate SDN controller for the Internet of Vehicles. * An exact model to minimize the wasted resource utilization of SDN controllers in an MEC-NFV environment. * A heuristic algorithm to handle highly dense and dynamic scenarios in IoV aiming at defining: (a) The required number of SDN controllers; (b) The assignment between RSUs and controllers; and (c) The amount of resources that should be allocated to the SDN controllers. The remainder of this article is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses related work. Section 3 presents the DSDVMEC architecture. Section 4 formulate an exact model and the aSDNulloc heuristic responsible for the decision to allocate the controllers through VNFs. Numerical analysis, show the results and summarize possible directions for future research are presented in Section 5. Finally, Section 6 concludes this article. Table 1 is the summary of important acronyms for this paper.