Continuous IPv6 Communications in a Vehicular Networking Stack for Current and Future ITS Services

Resumen

The Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) community and road transport stakeholders are nowadays seeking for practical solutions in the area of vehicular communications and telematics. It is the time to provide real implementations that can be tested and evaluated in field operational tests.The work presented in this paper follows this line and a communication stack based on the well-known IPv6 protocol is described in detail. The main aim in the design of this stack has been providing an integral management of IPv6 mobility. For this reason, the proposal is based on Network Mobility (NEMO)to support eventual point of attachment changes at IPv6 level but, additionally, an authentication/authorization mechanism is added to automate the access to secured domains, and extended capabilities to support handovers have been added. The IEEE802.21 standard is used to enhance vertical and horizontal handovers by publishing and centralizing access information of available wireless networks. Moreover, on the top of this access and networking layer, which also provides extra security features, a set of OSGi modules are given as facilities to make easier the implementation of applications. As it is noted in the rest of the paper, the proposal presented in this paper conforms with ISO TC 204 and ETSI TC ITS specifications and proposes new extensions for improving security and handover support, integrates IETF protocols, and it is being continuously improved in frames of the EU ITSSv6 project and tested on the Spanish FOT OASIS project.