Driven by long traffic jams and numerous road accidents, vehicle networks (Vehicular Ad hoc NETwork, VANET) have emerged to make the journey more pleasant, the road safer and the transport system more efficient. Today’s vehicle network architectures suffer from scalability issues as it is challenging to deploy services on a large scale. These architectures are rigid, difficult to manage and suffer from a lack of flexibility and adaptability due to vehicular technologies’ heterogeneity.

Over the past few years, the emerging paradigm of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) network architecture has become one of the most important technologies for managing large-scale networks such as vehicle networks. By the first vision and under the SDN paradigm umbrella, we propose a new VANET network architecture based on the SDN paradigm named “SDN-based vehicular ad hoc networks” (SDN-VANET). Through our simulation, we show that in addition to the flexibility and fine programmability brought by the SDN paradigm, the latter opens the way to the development of efficient network control functions.