Mobility management for vehicular ad hoc networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks are gaining importance for inter-vehicle communication, because they allow for the local communication between vehicles without any infrastructure, configuration effort, and without the high costs of cellular networks. Besides local data exchange, vehicular applications may be extended by accessing Internet services. The access is provided by Internet gateways installed along the roadside. However, the Internet integration requires a respective mobility support of the vehicular ad hoc network. In this paper we propose MMIP6, a communication protocol that integrates multihop IPv6-based vehicular ad hoc networks into the Internet. Whereas existing approaches are focused on small-scale ad hoc networking scenarios, MMIP6 is highly optimized for scalability and efficiency. The evaluation showed that MMIP6 is a suitable solution providing a scalable mobility support with an acceptable performance characteristic.