Dynamic Controller Assignment in Software Defined Internet of Vehicles through Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning

International audienceIn this paper, we introduce a novel dynamic controller assignment algorithm targeting connected vehicle services and applications, also known as Internet of Vehicles (IoV). The proposed approach considers a hierarchically distributed control plane, decoupled from the data plane, and uses vehicle location and control traffic load to perform controller assignment dynamically. We model the dynamic controller assignment problem as a multi-agent Markov game and solve it with cooperative multi-agent deep reinforcement learning. Simulation results using real-world vehicle mobility traces show that the proposed approach outperforms existing ones by reducing control delay as well as packet loss. Index Terms-Internet of Vehicles (IoV), Software Defined Networking (SDN), multi-agent deep reinforcement learning, controller assignment