Analyzing dynamic IPv6 address auto-configuration techniques for group IP-based vehicular communications

Dynamic IPv6 addressing and routing configuration in vehicular networks is an important challenge that has attracted a fair amount of attention recently. Early proposals adapted fixed-infrastructure and MANET models and thus inherited their latency and overhead. Later, researchers relaxed some of the often restrictive assumptions (e.g., Router Advertisement TTL extension) but still focused on certain limited scenarios. Very recently, in the wake of the emerging concept of Future Internet, a general questioning arose on whether one naming and addressing model suits every network topology. Along this line of research, the present article poses the terms of this problem in the IP-based vehicular communications area and aims at giving one solution space instance based on the Vehicle Identification Numbers (VIN) namespace. This article advances the state-of-the-art as follows: (1) It presents a comprehensive and detailed tutorial of the main dynamic IPv6 auto-configuration approaches. (2) It gives the specifics of Future Internet paradigm as applied to vehicular networking and presents a novel approach for group and infrastructure communications based on VIN namespace. (3) It offers a comprehensive feature and analytical comparison to evaluate the proposals that fit best our communication paradigm.