A vehicle-mounted communication system integrating satellite and terrestrial networks

Next generation wireless network (NGWN) is expected to integrate different access technologies, including cellular network, WLAN and mobile Ad Hoc network, etc. This paper designs and implements a vehicle-mounted communication system integrating satellite and terrestrial networks such as 2G/3G/MANET, etc. Unlike other existed stand-alone facilities, several vehicles with different access interfaces to wide area networks can build a mobile ad-hoc mesh network in the proposed system, and an inter-vehicle protocol is designed to share the communication resources among the group of vehicles. Functional tests confirm the validity of the approach.