On the Uplink MAC Performance of a Drive-Thru Internet

As IEEE 802.11 access points (APs) open up services to mobile clients, opportunistic access to the roadside communication infrastructures from traveling vehicles has become more prominent and has drawn considerable attention. In particular, data uploading from traveling vehicles has a great potential for many vehicular ad hoc network applications, where both the intermittent connectivity and the time-varying vehicle arrivals have presented significant challenges to the current analytical models. Our focus is on the carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance-based medium access control (MAC) layer performance in a last-hop drive-thru Internet, considering both the contention nature of the uplink and the realistic vehicle traffic model. Analytical and simulation results show the intrinsic relationships among the vehicle density and speed, the coverage of the AP, the achievable throughput, and the total amount of data uploaded by vehicles. We further investigate the efficacy of an admission control scheme by the AP for achieving an optimal operating region that has both a high throughput and a large amount of data uploaded from each drive-thru vehicle.