NEMO route optimization with strong authentication for aeronautical communications

The introduction of IPv6 in the area of air traffic control communications is slowly advancing. The Network Mobility (NEMO) protocol can support the mobility of an airborne mobile router (MR) across different air-ground access technologies that are used during different phases of flight. Similar to Mobile IP, NEMO relies on forwarding all traffic via a home agent. No standardized route optimization (RO) protocol for solving this triangular routing problem is available as of now though. The already existing Correspondent Router (CR) protocol addresses this issue, but we will show that it suffers from security deficiencies. Hence, it is not suitable for the aeronautical environment. We therefore propose an authentication method for the CR protocol that provides a higher level of security. In addition, this method also allows a MR to establish and maintain a route optimized path to the CR in case the home agent should not be reachable. Furthermore, our method provides a better handover performance compared to the original protocol and other related work. Results from a Linux-based test-bed evaluation show this improvement. We also show that the signaling overhead for the proposed protocol has been reduced when used over a certain time period.