Distributed SDN-Based Communication Architecture for the Pods4Rail System

Abstract

Future multimodal transportation systems require reliable, low-latency communication infrastructures to coordinate autonomous vehicles and moving infrastructure across rail and road networks. Traditional centralized control architectures struggle to meet these requirements in highly dynamic environments due to increased latency, limited scalability, and poor adaptability to changing network conditions. To address this, we propose a distributed communication architecture integrating Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC), that can create a flexible, programmable and lowlatency network. Results show controller communication and flow setup latency between edge SDN controllers and Pods are lower than reported in literature. The framework uses hierarchical control with regional and edge controllers to support low-latency interface management and edge autonomy. Operational workflows and control logic are defined as representative scenarios. The architecture combines regional policy coordination with edge-level autonomy, enabling local failover and adaptive interface management without central dependency.