Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Interactive Wifi Connectivity For Moving Vehicles, Aruna Balasubramanian, Ratul Mahajan, Arun Venkataramani, Brian Neil Levine, John Zahorjan

Computer Science Department Faculty Publication Series

We ask if the ubiquity of WiFi can be leveraged to provide cheap connectivity from moving vehicles for common applications such as Web browsing and VoIP. Driven by this question, we conduct a study of connection quality available to vehicular WiFi clients based on measurements from testbeds in two different cities. We find that current WiFi handoff methods, in which clients communicate with one basestation at a time, lead to frequent disruptions in connectivity. We also find that clients can overcome many disruptions by communicating with multiple basestations simultaneously. These findings lead us to develop ViFi, a protocol that opportunistically …