HMM-based modelling of roadside-to-vehicle WLAN communications

Roadside-to-vehicle communications has recently gained significant research attention. The idea is to exploit opportunistically encountered public WLAN APs from vehicles moving on their normal routes. Different aspects of this challenging communication scenario has been explored in several previous works, however, nothing notable has been done on mathematically modelling this kind of connection. In this article, we characterize a typical roadside-to-vehicle connection using Hidden Markov Models after showing that previously known models are not applicable for vehicular environments. Such a model can help analyze the performance of WLANs in delivering network services to mobile nodes travelling at vehicular speeds. We base our model on the data collected from the drive runs conducted in a certain area of the city.