5G Next generation VANETs using SDN and Fog Computing Framework Ammara Anjum Khan ∗ , Mehran Abolhasan † , Wei Ni ‡ ∗ Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology (FEIT), University of Technology, Sydney, Australia ammaraanjum.khan@student.uts.edu.au † mehran.abolhasan@uts.edu.au ‡ Wei.Ni@csiro.au Abstract— The growth of technical revolution towards 5G Next gen- eration networks is expected to meet various communica- tion requirements of future Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Motivated by the consumer needs for variety of ITS applications, bandwidth, high speed and ubiquity, researches are currently exploring different network architectures and techniques, which could be employed in Next generation ITS. To provide flexible network management, control and high resource utilization in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) on large scale, a new hierarchical 5G Next generation VANET architecture is proposed. The key idea of this holistic ar- chitecture is to integrate the centralization and flexibility of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Cloud-RAN (C- RAN), with 5G communication technologies, to effectively allocate resources with a global view. Moreover, a fog com- puting framework (comprising of zones and clusters) has been proposed at the edge, to avoid frequent handovers between vehicles and RSUs. The transmission delay, throughput and control overhead on controller are analyzed and compared with other architectures. Simulation results indicate reduced trans- mission delay and minimized control overhead on controllers. Moreover, the throughput of proposed system is also improved. Index Terms—Next generation VANETs, Software Defined VANETs, Fog computing, Edge Computing, 5G VANET archi- tecture. I. I NTRODUCTION VANETs have been regarded as key enabling technology of Next generation ITS, that is envisioned to offer a wide variety of versatile services to ITS consumers, ranging from transportation and road safety to infotainment applications like web browsing, video streaming file downloading and etc. [1]. The society of 2020 is predicted to be a connected society. The emerging idea of Internet of Things (IoT) together with intelligent and integrated sensor systems and in-home sensor networks are expected to potentiality exert influence on consumer’s daily lives and are expected to motivate huge market in near future. During the last few decades, VANETs are rapidly evolving. The number of connected vehicles is predicted to reach 250 million, by 2020 [2]. Moreover, by 2020, smarter and secure ITS are expected to be operational as a VANET cloud [3]. To enable smart vehicles to get connected, it is essential for a vehicle to access Internet and com- municate with neighbours through wireless communication infrastructures. Nevertheless, current VANET architectures can not meet the latency requirements of future ITS applications in highly congested and mobile scenarios. The future trend of autonomous vehicles drives current VANET architectures, broaden their limits with hard real-time requirements. In addition, the maturity of cloud computing has adapted the invasion of vehicular space with cloud-based services. To provide an efficient communication and cooperation on large scale VANETs, millions of vehicles are widely spread in the environment of Internet of Vehicles (IoV), where drivers and passengers can enjoy all ITS services through Internet [4]. The cloudification of network resources through SDN and C- RAN is another promising enabler for 5G Next generation vehicular networks. SDN is leading towards a revolutionary paradigm which controls the network in a centralized and programmable manner by decoupling the forwarding functions (data plane) and network controls (control plane). Moreover, due to its potential to offer flexibility, programmability and centralized knowledge, it facilitates flexible network manage- ment and control on large scale, with unified abstraction [4], [5], [6]. SDN has recently attracted research in mobile wireless networks like VANETs. SDN is also considered as one of the most promising techniques that can conveniently be applied to support the dynamic nature and dense deployment scenarios of future VANET functions and applications, while reducing the operational cost [7], [8]. On the other hand, the proposal of Cloud (or centralized) Radio Access Network (C-RAN) by China Mobile [9], is an affective and open cloud-based infras- tructure that includes Baseband Units (BBUs), Remote Radio Units (RRUs), and antennas. The centralization of BBUs and cooperation among RRUs and antennas through open cloud- based infrastructure can effectively improve system spectrum efficiency. The virtualization techniques can share different resources operated by BBUs, according to service demands of different cells, thus reducing operational cost and power consumption [8]. On the other hand, the role of fog computing in IoT [10], [11] plays an important part in satisfying the real time service demands of future ITS scenarios. The main contributions of paper are as follows: • We propose a new hierarchical 5G Next generation 2018 15th IEEE Annual Consumer Communications & Networking Conference (CCNC) 978-1-5386-4790-5/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE