# Dynamic Allocation of SDN Controllers in NFV-Based MEC for the Internet of Vehicles  
[PERSON] Simoes  
Centre de Informatica, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Recife 50740-560, PE, Brazil; [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (K.D. ), [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (R.M.) [PERSON] and [PERSON]  
Centre de Informatica, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Recife 50740-560, PE, Brazil; [EMAIL_ADDRESS] (K.  
safety and self-driving through a full autonomic approach with no human intervention on the operation of IoV [13; 14]. Recent efforts towards turning traditional and ossified VANETs (Vehicular Ad hoc Networks) into flexible/agile ones have been initiated by the adoption of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) to aid the management and control of vehicular networking [15; 16; 17; 18]. SDN, originally devised in the context of data centers and wired networks, provides programmability by splitting the control and data planes. This way, network elements (data plane) rely on the intelligence of the SDN controller (i.e., logic that govern packet forwarding, dropping, and other control plane functionalities) running on commodity hardware equipment with global view to program network's elements. Upon arrival of novel flows at data plane, the SDN controller is in charge of defining rules to be installed in the network elements according to management policies implemented by the operator [19; 20]. A first issue with regard to the IoV scalability has been addressed by adopting multiple SDN controllers to deal with the possible huge number of flow requests of vehicles [16; 21]. These controllers are, in general, deployed on remote clouds, operator core network, or vehicular access points, which can be 802.11p/Road Side Units (RSUs), LTE eNBs (Long Term Evolution evolved Node B) or 5G gNBs, for example. However, even with the possibility of positioning the controllers at access points to achieve reduced communication delay, recent works still rely on static deployment [22]. This approach lacks processing capabilities and depends on the distant cloud. Thus, such solutions do not integrate the needed functionalities near the user for fast decision making. In summary, IoV faces critical requirements, which should be jointly designed: the scalable and dynamic deployment of SDN controllers and reduced communication latency [5]. Towards a flexible, scalable and dynamic deployment of SDN controllers, IoV scenarios could benefit from a highly complementary approach, namely Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) [23; 24; 25]. NFV aims at decoupling network functions (e.g., Firewall, MME, NAT, and load balancer) from the proprietary/dedicated hardware appliances to run as virtualized services in a cloud-based platform using general purpose equipment's (COTS) [26]. More specifically, NFV can benefit SDN, for example, by virtualizing SDN controllers as Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs), the software implementations of network functions, executed on a centralized server pool [27]. VNFs are provisioned and controlled through Management and Orchestration (MANO) Framework of NFV standard [28]. As far as we know, vehicular communications literature has no proposal on the synergy between SDN and NFV in order to address dynamic provisioning of SDN controllers in an NFV-based framework for Internet of Vehicles. With regard latency bounds of IoV, a novel paradigm has also been recently emerged to compound the 5G and beyond conceptual architecture aiming to bring storage/computing capabilities requirements to the edge of the network, namely Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) [29]. MEC has been standardized by European Telecommunications Standardization Institute (ETSI) since 2014 and provides cloud computing capabilities to the edge of the network through virtualized servers or micro datacenters at the eNBs, that is, within the operator's the Radio Access Network (RAN).