Real Experience with IPv6 Communications in Highways

Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems (C-ITS) are intended to improve safety and efficiency of roads worldwide. In the last ten years multitude of research works have served to reach ITS specifications within standardization organizations such as ISO, ETSI or IEEE. Platforms implementing such recent standards have bursted into the international ITS scene under the Field Operation Tests (FOT) nomenclature, however, many initiatives in this line have bet on pure ITS communication protocols, instead of thinking of the importance of interconnecting vehicles and the road infrastructure with the future Internet based on the Internet of Things (IoT) concept. IPv6 is essential in this framework, and not only because of interoperability, but also due to the advantages provided by Internet protocols in vehicular networks, such as global reachability, network mobility, auto-configuration, easiness of deployment or the use of extensively tested protocols, among others. For this reason, we present an IPv6-based communication platform considering both the ITS standardization and the Internet viewpoints. The key contribution of the work remains in the deployment of the network design in real highways under the umbrella of the FOTsis project, and its evaluation by using totally operational software and hardware units. The results show that the IPv6-based vehicular network performs correctly and is able to work with different communication technologies (3G and 802.11p), abstracting applications from network management duties.