IPv6 neighbor discovery for prefix and service discovery in vehicular networks

This paper proposes an extension of IPv6 neighbor discovery (ND) for rapid network prefix and service discovery in vehicular networks. It is assumed that a vehicle as a moving network (MN) or a road-side unit (RSU) as a fixed network (FN) has an external network interface, and hosts in an MN periodically announce their services to their local DNS Server called recursive DNS server (RDNSS) of the MN. We define new options for prefix and service discovery in IPv6 ND through which an MN or an FN can fast exchange prefix and service information by sending the neighbor solicitation (NS) and neighbor advertisement (NA) messages containing a sender's prefix and service information. Through theoretical analysis comparing our proposed method with conventional methods separating prefix discovery and service discovery, our approach can reduce the delay of the prefix and service discovery to provide better intelligent transportation services (e.g., cooperative adaptive cruise control for collision avoidance) in vehicular environment.