The use of IPv6 in cooperative ITS: Standardization viewpoint

Abstract

Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is envisaged to be the cornerstone for the future development of ITS services. Both research communities and standardization forums are considering the use of IPv6 as a media-agnostic carrier for non-time critical safety applications as well as for traffic management. This interest is based on the numerous benefits brought by IPv6: large addressing space able to cope with ambitious deployment scenarios such as the vehicular one, easier support of management operations related to node auto-configuration and native support of security mechanisms. This chapter surveys the current European standard specifications in the field of IPv6-based communications applied to cooperative ITS systems. The convenience of using IPv6 technology is demonstrated by identifying a wide set of relevant ITS specifications where the application of IPv6 networking protocols outperforms other protocol solutions. Furthermore, this study is complemented with a performance assessment of IPv6 communications over a cooperative ITS scenario using a real IPv6-enabled communications stack compliant with the standardized ITS station reference architecture specified by International Standards Organization (ISO) and European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI).