Article

A measurement study of vehicular internet access using in situ Wi-Fi networks

Authors:

Vladimir Bychkovsky,

Hari Balakrishnan,

Samuel MaddenAuthors Info & Claims

MobiCom '06: Proceedings of the 12th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking

Pages 50 - 61

https://doi.org/10.1145/1161089.1161097

Published: 29 September 2006 Publication History

Abstract

The impressive penetration of 802.11-based wireless networks in many metropolitan areas around the world offers, for the first time, the opportunity of a "grassroots" wireless Internet service provided by users who "open up" their 802.11 (Wi-Fi) access points in a controlled manner to mobile clients. While there are many business, legal, and policy issues to be ironed out for this vision to become reality, we are concerned in this paper with an important technical question surrounding such a system: can such an unplanned network service provide reasonable performance to network clients moving in cars at vehicular speeds.To answer this question, we present the results of a measurement study carried out over 290 "drive hours" over a few cars under typical driving conditions, in and around the Boston metropolitan area (some of our data also comes from a car in Seattle). With a simple caching optimization to speed-up IP address acquisition, we find that for our driving patterns the median duration of link-layer connectivity at vehicular speeds is 13 seconds, the median connection upload bandwidth is 30 KBytes/s, and that the mean duration between successful associations to APs is 75 seconds. We also find that connections are equally probable across a range of urban speeds (up to 60 km/hour in our measurements). Our end-to-end TCP upload experiments had a median throughput of about 30 KBytes/s, which is consistent with typical uplink speeds of home broadband links in the US. The median TCP connection is capable of uploading about 216 KBytes of data.Our high-level conclusion is that grassroots Wi-Fi networks are viable for a variety of applications, particularly ones that can tolerate intermittent connectivity. We discuss how our measurement results can improve transport protocols in such networks.

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Index Terms

A measurement study of vehicular internet access using in situ Wi-Fi networks
1. General and reference
  1. Cross-computing tools and techniques
    1. Measurement
    2. Metrics
2. Networks
  1. Network types
    1. Mobile networks
    2. Wireless access networks

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

MobiCom '06: Proceedings of the 12th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking

September 2006

428 pages

ISBN:1595932860

DOI:10.1145/1161089

General Chair:
Mario Gerla
UCLA
,
Program Chairs:
Chiara Petrioli
Rome University "La Sapienza", Italy
,
Ram Ramjee
Bell Labs

Copyright © 2006 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 29 September 2006

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MobiCom06

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MobiCom06: 12th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking

September 23 - 29, 2006

CA, Los Angeles, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 440 of 2,972 submissions, 15%

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