GeoNet: A project enabling active safety and IPv6 vehicular applications

Abstract

Next generation vehicles are expected to exchange information with other non-LOS vehicles, the road infrastructure and databases in the Internet in order to increase road safety and traffic efficiency, or simply to entertain passengers. In this context, the mutual knowledge of positions and trajectories is necessary and is only meaningful to vehicles in a particular geographic area - potentially far away from the information source. It requires reliable and scalable communication capabilities which we refer to as geographic addressing and routing (geonetworking). The TCP/IP protocol suite provides a unification layer between various physical communication technologies and various types of applications. A wide deployment of invehicle/onboard Internet access and services to millions of vehicles will only be possible with IPv6, the latest version of the Internet Protocol. However, geonetworking and IPv6 need still to be combined efficiently, which corresponds to GeoNet project target, i.e. to have single communication architecture, referred as "IPv6 geonetworking". It will allow for both IPv6 and non-IPv6 communications and will effectively provide a path to new and outstanding applications requiring data transmission to explicit geographical areas. GeoNet aims at developing a reference specification of "IPv6 geonetworking", with active participation in standardization bodies such as ETSI TC ITS, ISO TC204 WG16 (CALM) and IETF.