A vehicle gateway to manage IP multimedia subsystem autonomous mobility

Abstract

Many users access new services provided by the IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) infrastructure. As users spend also many times in their vehicles, we think, giving access to the IMS through the vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) connectivity will be an evolution of the VANET. Giving IMS access is not sufficient in this case; we also need to deploy security mechanisms to secure exchanges between the vehicles and the infrastructure during mobility. In this article, we propose an autonomic architecture to achieve this goal. This architecture uses a vehicle gateway (VGW) that is auto-configured by the network and that eases the mobility management. Indeed, the high mobility of a vehicle may imply many changes of access points; nevertheless, the connection must not be broken even during these access point changes. The connection to the new access point must be authorised and the VGW authenticated before leaving the communication range of the last access point. We also introduce a knowledge plane. The role of the knowledge plane is to know the environment of the user, to define the better link to use and control the mobility of the VGW introducing also a new architecture to securely bind the user to the IMS.