Measuring the capacity of in-car to in-car vehicular networks

Author

Rubinstein, M.G. ; Ben Abdesslem, Fehmi ; De Amorim, Marcelo Dias ; Cavalcanti, S.R. ; Santos, Rafael Alves Dos ; Costa, Luís Henrique Maciel Kosmalski ; Duarte, Otto Carlos Muniz Bandeira ; Campista, Miguel Elias Mitre

Author_Institution

Univ. do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Volume

47

Issue

11

fYear

2009

fDate

11/1/2009 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

128

Lastpage

136

Abstract

A particular class of vehicular networks is the one that includes off-the-shelf end-user equipment (e.g., laptops and PDAs) running from the interior of vehicles: in-car nodes. They are subject to limited communication conditions when compared with nodes specifically designed to this context. Existing works either consider antennas installed on top of the vehicle roof or nodes that operate in infrastructure mode. In this article, we investigate through real experiments the characteristics of links formed by in-car nodes running off-the-shelf wireless technologies such as IEEE 802.11(a/g) in ad hoc mode. We surprisingly observe that in-car nodes do show enough performance in terms of network capacity to be used in a number of applications, such as file transfer in peer-to-peer applications. Nonetheless, we identify some key performance issues and devise a number of configuration recommendations and future work directions.

Keywords

ad hoc networks; mobile antennas; mobile computing; peer-to-peer computing; wireless LAN; IEEE 802.11(a/g); PDA; ad hoc mode; in-car vehicular networks; network capacity; off-the-shelf end-user equipment; peer-to-peer applications; Antenna measurements; Hardware; IP networks; Peer to peer computing; Performance evaluation; Safety; Telecommunication traffic; Testing; Throughput; Vehicles;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Communications Magazine, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0163-6804

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/MCOM.2009.5307476

Filename

5307476