Providing flexible services for heterogeneous vehicles: an NFV-based approach

Abstract

Currently, many automotive manufacturers including Mercedes Benz and BMW have released new products equipped with intelligent onboard systems (IOSs) that support interconnection between vehicles and the remote service center. With the help of IOSs, vehicles can obtain traffic information and enjoy location-based services, such as restaurant and nearby gas station recommendations. However, IOSs adopt a closed architecture and are very difficult to upgrade to support new services. NFV is introduced as a new methodology that offers a potential way out of this bottleneck. Utilizing virtualization technologies, NFV may execute services as software applications on standard IT platforms like servers, switches, and storage. Using NFV technology, closed IOSs can be transformed to open ones and upgraded with lower cost. In this article, we introduce an NFV-based framework for vehicular ad hoc networks, and discuss the benefits and challenges. We also present two use cases to demonstrate its strength.