Secure and Efficient Multicast-Enabled Handover Scheme Pertaining to Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks in PMIPv6

Abstract

In VANET, mobility management and handover management are two of the most intriguing and challenging research topics. The existing mobility management infrastructures are unable to provide seamless secure mobility and handover management. It is very common in a vehicular network that when a vehicle roams between two domains, its reachability status may be compromised. The main reason for this is the higher handover latency and packet loss during the handover process. In the last decade, IP-based mobility protocols have been proposed for interoperable handover management systems. There has been a great deal of interest in providing IP multicast to mobile nodes such as vehicles, and numerous strategies have been put forth thus far. This research article proposes an IP multicast-enabled handover architecture for VANET in PMIPv6. Adding the IP multicast facility to the authentication server allows handover management that is both intra-domain and inter-domain, which originally was not supported by PMIPv6. This makes it possible for the IP service of a vehicle to maintain a connection from any location, without changing the earlier application. Additionally, a secure architecture with authentication capabilities built on top of PMIPv6 is suggested for VANET to address the authentication problem. Finally, the article compares the performance of the proposed architecture with that of the ones currently in use by varying several factors, including the vehicle’s density, the setup costs required, and the unit transmission costs on wired and wireless links, and it shows that our proposed solution ensures the handover process with a minimal cost change.