A vehicular network mobility framework: Architecture, deployment and evaluation

Research on vehicular networks has increased for more than a decade, however, the maturity of involved technologies has been recently reached and standards/specifications in the area are being released these days. Although there are a number of protocols and network architecture proposals in the literature, above all in the Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) domain, most of them lack from realistic designs or present solutions far from being interoperable with the Future Internet. Following the ISO/ETSI guidelines in field of (vehicular) cooperative systems, this work addresses this problem by presenting a vehicular network architecture that integrates well-known Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) technologies successfully employed in Internet. More precisely, this work describes how Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) technologies such as Network Mobility (NEMO), Multiple Care-of Address Registration (MCoA), IP Security (IPsec) or Internet Key Exchange (IKE), can be used to provide network access to in-vehicle devices. A noticeable contribution of this work is that it not only offers an architecture/design perspective, but also details a deployment viewpoint of the system and validates its operation under a real performance evaluation carried out in a Spanish highway. The results demonstrate the feasibility of the solution, while the developed testbed can serve as a reference in future vehicular network scenarios.