A network access control solution based on PANA for intelligent transportation systems

The International Standards Organization (ISO) and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) have defined a common ITS reference communications stack which have paved the way to new research lines in vehicular networks. Currently, most of the efforts have focused on the definition and testing of ITS applications operating over Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) communication technologies. Unfortunately, little attention has been payed to ensure that only authenticated systems are granted access the network in Vehicular-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communications. This paper addresses this problem by improving the ISO/ETSI ITS communication architecture to support network access control functionality. The proposal is based on the standard Protocol for Carrying Authentication for Network Access (PANA), which is the most representative contribution of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to this security problem. Moreover, this proposal has been tested in a real environment in order to validate its performance and suitability for ITS.