IPv6 Neighbor Discovery with Multi-hop Communication for IP-Based Vehicular Networks

This paper presents a Vehicular Neighbor Discovery (VND) as an extension of IPv6 Neighbor Discovery (ND) for IP-based vehicular networks. An optimized Address Registration and a multihop Duplicate Address Detection (DAD) mechanism are specified to eliminate the frequent address reconfigurations of vehicles when passing between Rode-Side-Units (RSUs) in a Mobility Anchor (MA) domain for operation efficiency and vehicle energy saving. Furthermore, multi-hop communication for a vehicle outside the coverage of an RSU via relay vehicles is proposed to support communication between a vehicle and an RSU out of one-hop wireless communication range, which can extend the serving coverage of the RSU and improve network performance. Through performance evaluation, it is shown that our VND outperforms the legacy ND by greatly reducing DAD in vehicular networks, leading to the efficient IP address autoconfiguration operation.