Pervasive communication for commuters in public buses

Using inter-vehicular communications as a mobile backbone has been an area of active research in recent years. We propose a pervasive mobile communication network that utilises our BUSNet to provide Internet access for the public transportation system such as buses, taxi and trains. These vehicles act as the wireless backbone which connects to the Internet. Thus, users of cellular network can have a faster and lower cost pervasive mobile communication when they use public transports. Unique to our ad hoc to Internet architecture is a a lightweight Access Router discovery protocol, an event-driven neighbouring access router discovery protocol, and a distributed location service with privacy protection that works in conjunction with Internet protocol mobility. Moreover, we propose two information discovery protocols that use the properties of the movement of buses and access routers to provide information for possible advance services, prediction and quality-of-service.