An improved network mobility service for intelligent transportation systems

In the past few years, the concept of pervasive connectivity has become of crucial importance. New protocols have therefore been standardized to enable IPv6 mobility, such as the Network Mobility Basic Support (NEMO BS) protocol. This protocol is particularly suited for providing a global IPv6 connectivity in intelligent transportation systems. Yet, despite its popularity and maturity, it still suffers from various limitations which prevent its adoption in large-scale commercial deployments. Among these are operator specific issues such as the lack of practical and efficient bootstrapping procedure. Also, a global connectivity enables the provision of value-added services whose attractiveness mainly depends on their ease of configuration. In this paper, we focus on solutions to address both the bootstrapping of NEMO BS and service discovery in a mobile environment. By investigating various bootstrapping proposals, we advocate the use of a standardized solution extended with the missing pieces to operate in a NEMO BS environment. We also expose how operator services could be exported and announced in the mobile subnet. Authentication and authorization to access these services are also investigated. Experiments on a prototype show that our proposal brings the missing blocks towards the deployment of network mobility service in intelligent transportation systems. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.