Alpha Coverage: Bounding the Interconnection Gap for Vehicular Internet Access

—Vehicular Internet access via open WLAN access points (APs) has been demonstrated to be a feasible solution to provide opportunistic data service to moving vehicles. Using an in situ deployment, however, such a solution does not provide worstcase performance guarantees due to unpredictable intermittent connectivity. On the other hand, a solution that tries to cover every point in an entire road network with APs (full coverage) is not very practical due to the prohibitive deployment and operational cost. In this paper, we introduce a new notion of intermittent coverage for mobile users, called α-coverage, which provides worst-case guarantees on the interconnection gap while using significantly fewer APs than needed for full coverage. We propose efficient algorithms to verify whether a given deployment provides α-coverage and approximation algorithms for determining a deployment of APs that will provide α-coverage. We compare α-coverage with opportunistic access of open WLAN APs...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Zizhan Zheng, Prasun Sinha, Santosh Kumar
• Keywords: Communications, INFOCOM 2009, Interconnection Gap, Open Wlan, Random Deployment