An Efficient Association Control Method for Vehicular Networks with Mobile Hotspots

The increasing demand from passengers in vehicles to improve safety, traffic efficiency, and comfort has lead to the growing interest of Wi-Fi based vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications. Although the V2I system provides fast and cost-effective Internet connectivity to vehicles via roadside Wi-Fi access points (APs), it suffers from frequent handoffs due to the high mobility of vehicles and the limited coverage of Wi-Fi APs. Recently, the Mobile AP (MAP) platform has emerged as a promising solution that overcomes the problem in the V2I systems. The main advantage is that MAPs may yield longer service duration to the nearby vehicles that have similar mobility patterns, yet they provide smaller link capacities than the roadside APs. In this paper, we present a new association control technique that harnesses available connection duration as well as achievable link bandwidth in high-speed vehicular network environments. We also analyze the tradeoff between two association metrics, namely, available connection duration and achievable link bandwidth. Extensive simulation studies based on real traces demonstrate that our scheme significantly outperforms the previous methods. Keywords: V2I communication, mobile AP, duration and bandwidth estimation, and association control.