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An Open Network for Testing, Verification and Validation of IPv6-based ITS Components Thierry Ernst1, László Bokor2, Antoine Boutet3, Yoann Lopez4 1

Institut National pour la Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, Rocquencourt France, [email protected] 2 Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest, Hungary, [email protected] 3 Institut de Recherche en Informatique et Systèmes Aléatoires, INRIA, Rennes, France , [email protected] 4 Thales Communications France, Paris, France, [email protected]

Abstract—In this paper we review the progress of an ongoing work which aims at designing and setting up a large-scale open testbed for testing, verification and validation of IPv6-based ITS components. A European Commission partially funded project called ANEMONE provides the ground for the presented architecture by introducing the widest range of access networks and advanced mobility technologies in a pan-European environment.

most of which based on i) mobility ii) always on and iii) converging services [2]. In order to exhibit the large scope of applications which can be tested, verified or evaluated on ANEMONE testbed, five representative scenarios have been proposed within the project: 1.

Chat between students in different locations

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Teacher on the move giving a live lecture to remote students

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Communication between university staff

I. ANEMONE: A PAN-EUROPEAN ALL-IPV6 ADVANCED MOBILITY TESTBED

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Car driving assistance for ITS cooperative systems

ANEMONE is a research project partially funded by European Commission under the 6th Framework Programme [1]. Launched in June 2006, its purpose is to set up an open and public testbed on which other organizations can evaluate IPv6 mobility technologies (new protocols, mechanisms or hardware using IPv6). In addition, the testbed is self-sufficient to support the evaluation of large-scale, distributed applications like the ITS-related ones. This testbed is deployed by the project’s partners over four locations across Europe. It provides:

5.

Treasure quest

Keywords: advanced IPv6 mobility, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), large-scale open testbed, NEMO, multihoming

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several IPv6 access networks (e.g. UMTS, Wi-Fi), either natively or via the necessary transition mechanisms;

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the basic IPv6 functionalities and the IPv6 address space;

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advanced IPv6-based mobility features (NEMO, Mobile IPv6, Multiple Care-of Address, etc.), and the mobility-specific entities (Home Agents, Mobile Routers, Mobile Nodes);

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different services and applications such as authentication, access control and accounting (AAA) and IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS).

However the rational of the project is not limited in trying to provide to European organizations, industries and research institutes a tool to verify and experiment new ideas, but the aim is also to try to include users and early testers to improve the use cases and the emerging models

The former three are scenarios that will actually be demonstrated by ANEMONE partners in order to assess the technical features and the usefulness of the testbed whereas the latter two have been identified as the most promising ones for hosted third-party experiments. The availability of the ANEMONE testbed fits the needs of ongoing European work on IPv6 communications for ITS (Intelligent Transport Systems) communications. In Europe there is an intensive ongoing work on communications for ITS applications as this could be witnessed from the Car-to-Car Communications consortium, the CVIS, COOPERS, SAFESPOT and the SeVeCom projects: •

C2C-CC: The CAR 2 CAR Communication Consortium [3] is an open, non-profit organization funded by vehicle manufacturers in Europe devoted to the goals of enhancing inter-vehicle communication technologies (e.g. by introducing geographic addressing and routing) in order to increase road traffic safety and transport efficiency.

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CVIS: Cooperative Vehicle-Infrastructure Systems [4] is an IST-FP6 Integrated Project visioning a transparent, open and reusable platform which allows all kind of vehicles and transportation infrastructure elements to communicate with each other thus enabling the widest range of potential cooperative services and applications [5]. The envisioned platform

implements an IPv6 communication system inspired by the NEMO-based ISO TC204 WG16 ‘CALM’ architecture [6]. •

COOPERS: CO-OPerative SystEms for Intelligent Road Safety [7] is an IST-FP6 co-funded research, development, and innovation activity which mainly focuses on advanced telematics applications for road traffic infrastructure with the primary objective of establishing cooperative traffic management between vehicle and transportation infrastructure.

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SAFESPOT: SAFESPOT [8] is an IST-FP6 cofounded integrated research project aiming to investigate how intelligent vehicles and intelligent roads can constitute a comprehensively cooperative system in order to substantially enhance road safety.

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In accordance with this, we firstly give a short overview of the proposed testbed architecture highlighting the main components, tasks and motivations. Section 3 summarizes the main features of the testbed, while Section 4 illustrates the applicability of the presented architecture to ITS. In Section 5 some possible ITS use cases are presented followed by Section 6 which deals with ANEMONE’s ITS usage guidelines. The paper concludes with the summary of the current status and the outline of the further work in Section 7. II. TESTBED DESCRIPTION The testbed is distributed over several sites in Europe belonging to ANEMONE partners, all interconnected over the GEANT [12] pan-European backbone (Figure 1).

SeVeCom: Secure Vehicular Communication [9] is a European funded project dedicated to create a complete definition and fully working implementation of a security framework for vehicular communication systems specified to road traffic.

Concerned about the interoperability of the different approaches followed by each of these groups, the European Commission is trying to harmonize the work. As vehicles usually have a time expectancy by far overcoming the life expectancy of wireless technologies, there is a strong need for a common technology that can simultaneously enable the long-term evolution and backward compatibility of future vehicular communication systems. In this context, the key point is the IP convergence. Being the long-term evolution of IP, IPv6 seems to be the most adequate technology for the convergence layer between the increasingly large panel of available wireless technologies and the more and more complex vehicular communication systems [10]. There is therefore a trend towards IPv6 communications in EC and worldwide efforts which is currently led by projects like CVIS. In CVIS, all vehicles are IP networks on wheels, i.e. each vehicle is indeed an IP mobile subnet managed by the NEMO Basic Support protocol [11]. At some point in time, either existing ITS projects or upcoming ones will need to evaluate services, applications, networking components or hardware in an IPv6 environment. Existing projects, such as CVIS, usually can’t afford to deploy a large-scale IPv6 testbed offering an extensive panel of IPv6 features, because they may not have the necessary provision for this task or the required expertise, human force, or budget to set up even the portion of the features they need. The ANEMONE testbed perfectly fits the needs of the aforementioned ITS-related projects and many others when it comes to test IPv6 features or compatibility for IPv6. A wide range of ITS-related applications are possible such as collision avoidance, navigation, localization, fleet management, infotainment, etc.

Figure 1. ANEMONE testbed architecture - Overview

The detailed infrastructure at each test site: A. The French site The French testbed site is located at Rennes and is managed by two partners: ENST-Bretagne and INRIA. Both are interconnected to other ANEMONE partners by a Gigabit link to Renater, the French academic backbone. INRIA site is located on the University of Rennes campus which comprises 1km2 and several kms of private roads. While providing indoor coverage of most buildings across the campus, 40 outdoor access points will be deployed in order to provide, when fully set up, a/b/g WiFi outdoor connectivity over all the campus areas including the roads. Wi-Fi horizontal handover will be available with the advertisement of different IPv6 prefixes depending on the localization on the campus. A 3G access will also be provided on the campus and allow vertical handovers between the Wi-Fi and the cellular networks. Indoor and outdoor wireless connectivity is fully managed

by ANEMONE partners. That allows configuring the testbed to address specific needs. All roads passing through the campus are private and most types of road infrastructures are present (crossroad, roundabout, carpark, etc.). ENST-Bretagne testbed location provides indoor a/b/g Wi-Fi coverage for all its buildings. Additionally, a 3G IPv6 outdoor access network is made available. Horizontal and vertical handovers are possible by the full management of the Wi-Fi and 3G infrastructure that is provided in the area. B. The Italian site The Italian testbed site is located in Monreale, and it consists of mixed indoor and outdoor networks, that represent quite well the European old fashion cities with narrow roads and buildings very close to each other. The network includes dedicated Wi-Fi/HiperLAN access points located on strategic locations (e.g. higher buildings) covering the metropolitan downtown, while the indoor part is located in the CRES buildings. The site has a terrific amount of IPv6 native addresses and two networks will be implemented thus giving the opportunity to implement a realistic scenario with two different actors (ISPs). The location will also implement AAA access due to national restrictions therefore making the testbed site even more interesting for the Italian researchers. The testbed also implements UMTS via a tunneled coverage (SIM cards provided by a national UMTS provider) and WiMAX coverage could appear in the near future. C. The Finnish site In the Finnish testbed location, the main enabler for ITS research is the municipal Wi-Fi network called panOULU. It offers a free and open IPv4 and IPv6 access not only indoors but also outdoors, currently mostly in Oulu city centre, as well as an experimental Internet connectivity for travelers in some local bus and ferry lines. Currently, the network consists of 700 deployed a/b/g WiFi access points, which are also used to provide a coarse positioning service for the applications. panOULU can be complemented by wide area access technologies available in the region, which includes Octopus 3G service development environment and a FlashOFDM network, and the development of new ITS services can benefit from the information provided by the regional traffic portal OLLI (traffic flow, weather, timetables etc.), although it must be noted that these are out of control of the ANEMONE partners.

several communicating nodes, while the WLAN component provides building-wide wireless IPv6 coverage using about 15 Wi-Fi a/b/g compatible access points and three different Home Agent implementations (Linux, BSD, and Cisco IOS). The 3G sub-network’s radio part consists of one Node B and one RNC. Since BME-MIK has an UMTS frequency license only for research purposes, the radio access is strictly limited in transmission power. The 3G core network contains only the Packet Switched (PS) part of a standard UMTS core (HSS, GGSN-Home Agent, SGSN). In absence of the Circuit Switched (CS) infrastructure normal voice traffic is not possible, only pure data traffic can be managed (voice over IP is possible though, based on the PS infrastructure). A whole IP Multimedia Subsystem is also part of the BME-MIK’s 3G sub-network comprising all the key technologies of the future’s all-IP service and application oriented telecommunication architectures. ANEMONE testbed forms a virtual distributed core network based on the interconnection of the access network from each partner. Using tunneling mechanisms the topology of this distributed core network could be modified depending on the need for particular experimentation. The possibility to advertise single or several different global prefixes depending on the localization makes the ANEMONE testbed appear either as several operators or as a single autonomous system. This could be particularly useful in testing a wide range of real-life scenarios where the involved entities can move across different authority domains like inter-operator or international handovers. A good example for the above mentioned liaison inside the ANEMONE architecture is the tight interconnection between the outdoor ITS testing sites and the core IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) components located at BME-MIK. III. TESTBED FEATURES Some functionalities are duplicated whereas some are specific to one of the testbed locations. The following features are deployed in the testbed and will be particularly useful for ITS applications: •

Security: data protection, confidentiality and integrity for user's navigation, localization and other critical information (e.g. IPsec, TLS, etc.);

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Mobility management protocols: host mobility support using MobileIPv6, network mobility support using NEMO Basic Support and advanced Routing Optimization mechanism [11], [13], [14];

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Multimode communications: selection of the appropriate technology when several access networks are available simultaneously (cf the IETF MonAmi6 working group output, particularly multiple Care-of Addresses registration, flow filtering, etc.);

D. The Hungarian site The site located at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics – Mobile Innovation Center (BME-MIK, Hungary) includes a native IPv6 core independently maintained from the campus backbone and three different kinds of interworking wireless access subnetworks based on BlueTooth, WLAN and 3G laboratory coverage. The BlueTooth sub-network introduces only

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Network components: pre-configured laptops and computers with IPv6 mobility features (NEMO Basic Support or MIPv6), IPv6 embedded devices, sensors, Mobile Routers with multiple interfaces, Home Agent, IMS infrastructure, etc.;

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Evaluation and monitoring tools for testing the behavior of IPv6 advanced mobility features are also provided;

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Conformance and Interoperability Testing: validation tools are available to guarantee that the IPv6, Mobile IPv6 or NEMO Basic Support products integrated into the testbed conforms to their specifications (RFCs) and are able to interoperate together.

The state of the art in IPv6 mobility may be a limited factor to the usability of the testbed or the efficiency of IPv6 mobility under some ITS scenarios. ANEMONE is conducting research on the below advanced mobility mechanisms and results may be later brought to the testbed if progress allows and implementations are made available: •

NEMO to NEMO communications: The current NEMO technology is limited because routing has not been optimized for communications between two mobile entities. For instance V2V communications can rely on ad-hoc routing technologies (MANET) but availability of this technology cannot be easily assumed ubiquitously deployed. Also, the coverage area of this technology is relatively small, and not all vehicles may use the same technologies so V2V communications via the Internet infrastructure may be necessary to either replace or extend MANET.

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MANEMO (MANET for NEMO) and Multihoming: A solution for maintaining ad-hoc compositions of moving networks and selecting the best path even in the most complex scenarios must be provided because ITS applications are time critical and multiple paths (direct V2V or via the infrastructure V2V) may exist.

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Multicast from mobile entities to mobile entities: most information is sent from a vehicle, and in most cases could be sent to a number of recipients, also mobiles. Multicast could be useful here, but it is usually not optimized when both sender and recipients are mobile in the internet topology.

instance, a project that needs to test a collision avoidance application would require an outdoor testbed in a fairly rural area, whereas a car-sharing system would be best tested at a testbed in a sufficiently largely covered urban area. Some other third parties may only require IPv6 access with no need to actually move (e.g. to test a multimode mobile router). In this section we briefly describe our general concerns and the detailed advantages and limitations of the ANEMONE testbed regarding the applicability issues of the overall architecture to ITS. The main applicability of the testbed for ITS comes from the extended outdoor coverage that is made available on its various locations. The outdoor parts of the ANEMONE testbed are located in Oulu (Finland), in Monreale (Italy) and in the University of Rennes campus (France) which provide outdoor coverage of around 4km2 for Monreale, 1km2 for Rennes, 2km2 for Oulu, and around 80 km private road. In these different sites, all the categories of infrastructure and roads are represented from car-parks to various kinds of crossroads, therefore allowing to evaluate ITS scenarios in real environments. Some parts of the ANEMONE testbed have access networks comprising laboratory environment only with limited indoor coverage which is not appropriate for testing real-life ITS scenarios. However, these sites have other attractive services or applications. For example, BME-MIK has an IMS system dedicated to fully control and manage different multimedia services of the all-IP world and the interconnected nature of ANEMONE makes it appear as an essential brick for the whole testbed: by integrating the IPv6-compatible IMS into our architecture we gain an efficient tool in the work of translating the new and favorable all-IP IMS features into benefits for the widest range of ITS services and applications (e.g. combined voice, information and data services for interactive journey planning, ticketing and on-road entertainment). Based on the SIP-based IMS technology [15] we can span an overlay architecture on the top of ANEMONE’s every ITS network element introducing the key functions of the future’s service-oriented and application-oriented networks. Some of the main advantages of providing IMS access in vehicular communication systems: •

easy and efficient way of integrating the widest range of services and applications available from different sites and/or access networks (even from third party organizations as well);

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support for QoS negotiation, comprehensive charging, accounting and billing mechanisms;

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seamless integration of legacy services;

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integrated management capabilities.

IV. APPLICABILITY TO ITS The ANEMONE testbed is particularly useful to third parties working in the ITS domain which need to test or evaluate services, applications, networking components or hardware in an IPv6 environment. The span of the testbed over several sites across Europe, its flexible architecture to gain common features available at all sites and advanced features deployed at specific sites should allow accommodating most of the needs from third parties. For

With regard to the current trends in ITS-based communication, it is obvious that sooner or later all players of the future V2V or V2I communication market

will need an easy-to-use instrument for quick integration and examination of new IPv6-based services and applications even from third parties. The IP Multimedia Subsystem could be that generic instrument and that was our most important reason to take IMS into ANEMONE’s ITS activities. For third-party ITS projects, ANEMONE can be considered as a mobility service provider. By defining a AAA (Authentication, Authorization and Accounting) infrastructure, the ANEMONE project enables a largescale operational deployment of mobility services in this context. As ANEMONE testbed may manage a fair amount of users, there is ongoing work on several topics addressing the security and scalability issues of operational mobility service. The AAA service is of great interest for V2I communication systems as it allows securing both the network access service and the mobility service. The main provided features are: •

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EAP-based mutual authentication (e.g. EAP-TLS) between the vehicle and the infrastructure prevents typical attacks on mobile environments such as eavesdropping, man-in-the-middle, denial of service; security protocol suite for security negotiation and key exchange (e.g. IKEv2) allows the setup of needed security associations;

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strong security between the vehicle and the infrastructure enforces confidentiality and integrity of the data over the wireless links (e.g. IPSec, TLS);

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mobility service bootstrapping, relying on authentication, allows the secure automatic configuration of the mobility service, thus removing the burden of manual configuration (MIPv6 home agent, home address for the mobile node).

The interconnected architecture of the ANEMONE testbed will allow dispatching components of the testing across several sites. For instance, vehicles may be located in France, whereas the authentication server may be located in Italy and the IMS in Hungary, therefore validating the concept of an Italian vehicle located in France and accessing some service from a Hungarian third party Application Server based on home (Italian) authentication. V. ITS USE CASES The traditional communication model to achieve intervehicular communications relies on two assumptions, 1) a single and common technology (not IP) such as laser or other technologies to avoid collisions and inform one's direction and speed to nearby vehicles, and 2) a minimum density of vehicles. These two assumptions do not hold in the countryside, near borders with different regulation bodies, or when vehicles are not from the same generation or manufacturers. The system could well be enhanced when vehicles are able to communicate over the Internet

and inform each other about their speed, direction and expected time at a crossroad for instance using any available technology [16]. The ANEMONE testbed perfectly fits with indirect vehicle-to-vehicle communications (V2V) via the Internet. We consider that vehicles are equipped with several IPv6 access technologies and they are able to communicate any sort of data with other vehicles or servers in the Internet via any available technology. A vehicle can communicate directly with another vehicle one hop away (if they are in the same coverage area and are able to use a common technology) but most likely the communication will be set up over a fixed infrastructure involving one access technology on one side and another one on the other side. Vehicles may embed a single IP device (mobile host) or an entire network involving one (or several) mobile router and its attached network composed of fixed processing units such sensors, displays, etc. The Internet connectivity can be maintained over any available technology. To ensure this, at least one of the technologies must be available at any point in time. VI. ITS USAGE GUIDELINES The objective of the ANEMONE project is to open the testbed to external researchers and industrials and propose them a complete infrastructure of service facilities for experimenting, evaluating and validating their approaches or products in “real-life” conditions. Testbed users willing to test their own applications will be provided a set of credentials for authentication to ANEMONE testbed. This authentication allows us to prevent misuse of the testbed, to enforce different security policies and to grant different services according to userspecific needs that we may have agreed on. By providing dynamic mobile service authorization, we also make sure that we always automatically assign suitable Home Agent for mobility service. The usage of the testbed is free, but in order to carry out the hosting in the best possible conditions (from both the third party and the ANEMONE consortium points of view), it must be arranged according to the location and the availability of various components. The internal governance rules and procedures to apply the access of all or part of the testbed are described in a document available on the ANEMONE website [17]. The consortium engages to provide all the necessary efforts, facilities and confidentiality respects about the experiments, in exchange of which the third party is committed to inform of its activities and make the promotion of the ANEMONE project. ANEMONE is a 29 months project started in June 2006. The setting up of the open testbed is an ongoing work; some mobility services and applications are already

up and ready to receive third parties. The number of operating elements will increase during all the duration of the project. After the completion of the project, the testbed will be maintained, however the rules beyond that lifetime will be defined in a subsequent deliverables. We hope that the project will give a great opportunity to the ITS research community for testing, verification and validation of different IPv6-based ITS protocols and other components thanks to the open nature of the initiative and to the fact that this open architecture will remain active after the end of the project. VII. CONCLUSIONS ANEMONE provides a wide set of functionalities: network components, IPv6 access networks, advanced IPv6 mobility protocol features, and even devices that could be used by third parties which do not necessarily own all the necessary components to perform tests requiring an IPv6 mobility testbed. The ANEMONE testbed is particularly useful to third parties working in the ITS domain which need to test services, applications, networking components or hardware in an IPv6 environment. Since the testbed is split in several sites across Europe, with common features available at all sites and advanced features deployed at specific sites, there should be at least one test site able to accommodate the needs of each third party. The interested organizations and institutes are encouraged to contact the ANEMONE consortium in order to discuss the testing possibilities in more detail. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work is supported by the ANEMONE project which is partly funded by the Sixth Framework Programme of the European Commission’s Information Society Technology. The authors would like to thank all participants and contributors who take part in the work. REFERENCES [1] FP6-IST ANEMONE Project: “Advanced Next gEneration Mobile Open Network”, official homepage: http://ist-anemone.eu [2] L. Bokor, N. Montavont, P. D. Francesco, T. Ernst, T. Hof, J.Korva: “ANEMONE: A Pan-European Testbed to Validate IPv6 Mobility Technologies”, 2nd International Workshop on Network Mobility (WONEMO), Hiroshima, Japan, January 2007. [3] C2C-CC Project: “CAR 2 CAR Communication Consortium”, official homepage: http://www.car-to-car.org/ [4] CVIS Project: “Cooperative Vehicle-Infrastructure Systems”, official homepage: http://www.cvisproject.org/ [5] T. Ernst: “IPv6 Network Mobility in the CVIS Project”, 6th European Congress & Exhibition on Intelligent Transport Systems and Services (ITS'07), Aalborg, Denmark, June 2007. [6] CALM: “Continuous Communications Air Interface for Long and Medium Range technology”, currently being developed at ISO TC204 WG16, official homepage: http://www.calm.hu/ [7] COOPERS Project: “CO-OPerative SystEms for Intelligent Road Safety”, official homepage: http://www.coopers-ip.eu/

[8] FP6-IST SAFESPOT Project: “Cooperative vehicles and road infrastructure for road safety”, official homepage: http://www.safespoteu.org/ [9] SeVeCom Project: “Secure Vehicular Communication”, official homepage: http://www.sevecom.org/ [10] T. Ernst, R. Kuntz, F. Leiber, “A Live Light-Weight IPv6 Demonstration Platform for ITS Usages”, 5th ITST, Brest, France, June 2006. [11] V. Devarapalli, R. Wakikawa, A. Petrescu, P. Thubert, “Network Mobility (NEMO) Basic Support Protocol”, RFC 3963, January 2005. [12] GEANT: European multi-gigabit computer network for research and education purposes, official homepage: http://www.geant.net/ [13] D. Johnson, C. Perkins, J. Arkko, “Mobility Support in IPv6”, IETF RFC 3775, June, 2004. [14] M. Calderon, C. J. Bernardos, M. Bagnulo, I. Soto, A. De La Oliva: “Design and Experimental Evaluation of a Route Optimization Solution for NEMO”, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Comm., V. 24, I. 9, Sept. 2006. [15] H. Montes, G. Gomez, R. Cuny, J. F. Paris: “Deployment of IP Multimedia Streaming Services in Third Generation Mobile Networks”, IEEE Wireless Comm. V. 9, I. 5, Oct 2002 pp. 84 – 92. [16] T. Ernst: “The Information Technology Era of the Vehicular Industry”, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review (CCR) V. 25, I. 5, July 2006. [17] ANEMONE Project Deliverable D5.1: “Testbed governance rules and procedures”, official homepage: http://ist-anemone.eu