The recent rapid proliferation of the Internet has been promoting global development of network services. One of the features of the development of our vehicular society is that on-board vehicle terminals are becoming a successor to the human-carried cellular phones. Technological development is being carried on as a national project in Japan to establish information and communication network technology which supports user mobility (called "Smart Gateway" for the future vehicle-road communication system) to implement a variety of information services aimed at safe vehicle driving. This paper proposes a mobile network platform to implement highly reliable communications. The authors propose a mobile access node system by Autonomous Decentralized System (ADS) control to provide multiple radio communication zones as logical service providing cells. This system allows "continuous communication services" (uninterrupted and seamless services using short-range communication among microcells) and provides on-board vehicle terminals with IP services by interworking with the public/wide-area IP network using Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) for mobile access. For the radio access, the microcell mobility management for the short-range radio communication is described. This function provides features of fast packet data transmission in the roadside network system, assurance of the packet data transmission in the network during the handover and the entity authentication between the on-board vehicle terminal and the roadside network system. For the gateway system, IP gateway management is described. This function manages the IP address given to each on-board vehicle terminal to provide the wide-area IP services to on-board vehicle terminals. Finally, the functional mapping for ITS mobile network platform is described.
Abstract