Maximizing the Contact Opportunity for Vehicular Internet Access

Abstract—With increasing popularity of media enabled handhelds, the need for high data-rate services for mobile users is evident. Large-scale Wireless LANs (WLANs) can provide such a service, but they are expensive to deploy and maintain. Open WLAN access-points (APs), on the other hand, need no new deployments, but can offer only opportunistic services with no guarantees on short term throughput. In contrast, a carefully planned sparse deployment of roadside WiFi provides an economically scalable infrastructure with quality of service assurance to mobile users. In this paper, we propose to study deployment techniques for providing roadside WiFi services. In particular, we present a new metric, called Contact Opportunity, as a characterization of a roadside WiFi network. Informally, the contact opportunity for a given deployment measures the fraction of distance or time that a mobile user is in contact with some AP when moving through a certain path. Such a metric is closely related ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Zizhan Zheng, Zhixue Lu, Prasun Sinha, Santosh Kumar
• Keywords: Communications, Contact Opportunity, INFOCOM 2010, Mobile User, Roadside Wifi