A Vehicular Mobility Management Scheme for a Shared-Prefix Model Over IEEE WAVE IPv6 Networks

The IETF IPWAVE Working Group is developing an IPv6-based solution to establish connectivity for V2V and V2I communication. It proposes a vehicular mobility management scheme based on PMIPv6. In this scheme, a shared-prefix model is proposed for its vehicular link model. The shared-prefix model is to share a common prefix among several RSUs. When using it, a vehicle in the same prefix domain does not need to change its IPv6 address even if its serving RSU is changed. So its CNs do not notice the movement of the vehicle. This concept is very similar with PMIPv6, because PMIPv6 also hides the vehicle’s movement to its CNs if PMIPv6 does not use the route optimization. However, current IPWAVE draft of vehicular mobility management has several problems. Firstly, it requires a vehicular neighbor discovery, which is not compatible with standard IPv6 NDP. Secondly, PMIPv6 assumes that it acquires a MN-ID and a profile of a mobile node during the network attachment, but there is no authentication in IEEE WAVE networks. So, such information cannot be acquired in IEEE WAVE networks. We propose a vehicular mobility management scheme for a shared-prefix model over IEEE WAVE IPv6 networks. The proposed scheme introduces VMM-NDP module. It handles the path changes due to the serving RSU changes within a shared prefix domain. It also hides the IPv6 address change to CNs by maintaining the previous IPv6 address when the vehicle’s current IPv6 address is changed due to the movement of the vehicle into new shared prefix domain. In this scheme, a vehicle can know its movement. So, there is no need to acquire a MN-ID. And also, since this scheme uses a shared-prefix model, there is no need to obtain a profile.