Enhancing vehicular internet connectivity using whitespaces, heterogeneity, and a scouting radio

Tan Zhang, Sayandeep Sen, Suman Banerjee
2014 Proceedings of the 12th annual international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services - MobiSys '14  
We explore the use of TV whitespace communication systems for providing robust connectivity to vehicles. A key challenge in this setup is the asymmetry in transmit power limits -the fixed base station is allowed to communicate at up to 4 W, while the mobile gateways in vehicles are limited to 100 mW. This paper presents a specific solution to deal with this asymmetry in which whitespace transceivers are used in the downlink direction while a more traditional cellular path is used in the uplink
more » ... ne. While heterogeneous communication systems have been considered before (e.g., in some satellite networks), our solution explores some unique opportunities that arise in vehicular systems. In particular, we describe a system called Scout that uses a front radio at the head of a vehicle to look ahead and identify the best channel parameters to be used when the rear radio eventually reaches the forward post. We use these channel estimates to adapt a number of transmission mechanisms for improving the performance of flows through this heterogeneous network. We have implemented and deployed this system on moving vehicles in an urban environment, and demonstrated 3 -8× performance improvement over simpler alternatives that do not use the scouting technique.
doi:10.1145/2594368.2594371 dblp:conf/mobisys/ZhangSB14 fatcat:uoycjxh3mfh6pco74yy67udilm