An Integrated Cognitive Radio Network for Coastal Smart Cities

Abstract

The integration of different networks has attracted significant attention in academia. Both terrestrial and maritime communications systems have been attracting keen interest for ways to deal with various applications. As the environment of cognitive vehicular and maritime networks is extremely dynamic, these networks suffer with a long delay because of intermittent links while providing services for different applications. To this end, here we introduce the integration of cognitive vehicular and maritime networks to design a coastal smart city by utilizing software-defined networking, network function virtualization, and fog computing under the same infrastructure. This novel integrated cognitive coastal city fulfills the demand of each application user in a hybrid environment with a quicker response time. The idea is to combine vehicular and maritime communications to meet different user demands. Different virtual networks are launched by network function virtualization, and are managed and controlled by a software-defined networking controller. From the integration of software-defined networking, network function virtualization, and fog computing, both vehicular and marine users are provided with stable paths to meet each application’s demands.