Vehicular opportunistic communication under the microscope

We consider the problem of providing vehicular Internet access using roadside 802.11 access points. We build on previous work in this area [18, 8, 5, 11] with an extensive experimental analysis of protocol operation at a level of detail not previously explored. We report on data gathered with four capture devices from nearly 50 experimental runs conducted with vehicles on a rural highway. Our three primary contributions are: (1) We experimentally demonstrate that, on average, current protocols only achieve 50% of the overall throughput possible in this scenario. In particular, even with a streamlined connection setup procedure that does not use DHCP, high packet losses early in a vehicular connection are responsible for the loss of nearly 25% of overall throughput, 15% of the time. (2) We quantify the effects of ten problems caused by the mechanics of existing protocols that are responsible for this throughput loss; and (3) We recommend best practices for using vehicular opportunistic...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: MOBISYS
• Authors: David Hadaller, Srinivasan Keshav, Tim Brecht, Shubham Agarwal
• Keywords: MOBISYS 2007, Overall Throughput, Vehicular Opportunistic Access, Vehicular Opportunistic Connections, Wireless Networks