A compatibility strategy for enabling secure and efficient ITS communications in today’s Internet

Emerging communication services in the intelligent transportation systems (ITS) scenario have recently considered the provision of Internet services because this fact will aid in safety purposes and will offer a wide scope of applications to end users. Consequently, and considering the ITS scenario a specific mobile networking context (several connection capable nodes moving at the same time), mobile communications should provide the required security level as well as efficiency. In this regard, mobility management is the key aspect in this scenario so the mobility protocol underneath has to ensure those properties. In this article, thanks to the security and efficiency properties it provides from its design, we consider the NeMHIP protocol an appropriate alternative for managing mobility in the ITS context. Nevertheless, NeMHIP entails challenges when being introduced in the current legacy Internet architecture. In order to deal with these issues, this article proposes a compatibility strategy. This strategy involves a novel naming resolution procedure based on the definion of an evolved DNS resolution process. As a result, mobile networks can securely and efficiently move along the current Internet, using most common communication services transparently. We have implemented the compatibility solution in a testbed, validated its functionality and design correctness to assess its feasibility. Obtained results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed strategy.