Using Bandwidth-Road Maps for Improving

Vehicular Internet Access

Jun Yao, Salil S. Kanhere, Mahbub Hassan
The University of New South Wales, Sydney Australia

Challenges in Vehicular Environment Our Work

High-speed vehicular motion leads to a dynamic networking
environment, where Wireless Wide Area Networks (WWAN) bandwidth
changes frequently when a user changes its location. The varying
bandwidth conditions directly affect quality of experience of multimedia
applications.
• Characterize location-bandwidth dependency in vehicular mobility in
the form of Bandwidth-road Maps.
• Use location-bandwidth dependency for improving application QoS
in vehicular Internet.

Bandwidth-road Maps  Historical bandwidth data can be collected from passive or active
• Store location-specific mean bandwidth information: measurements through repetitive measurements.
- e.g., if you are at location X, you can expect an average bandwidth of  We have used simple hardware and active probing technique to
1.2Mbps from network provider A. measure bandwidth of 3 WWAN networks (2 HSDPA & 1 iBurst) from
75-trip experiments over two non-overlapped routes in Sydney.

Location:
each 500m road segment

GPS
Sensor

Bandwidth Measurements

Client
Internet Server
Loc-Specific
EWMA Mean
Vehicle
Geo-coded Bandwidth Samples
Bandwidth-Road Maps

Applying Bandwidth-road Maps in Multi-homed Vehicular Networks

Multi-homed Vehicular Networks

• User devices connect to the on-board network.
• Mobile Router (MR) and Home Agent (HA) seamlessly connect the
on-board network to Internet via multiple WWAN links.
• HA and MR schedules downlink and uplink network traffic, respectively.
• Bandwidth on each WWAN link fluctuates frequently when the vehicle
changes its location, thus schedulers need to constantly adjust traffic
loads on each WWAN link to adapt to the varying bandwidth resources.
• Commercial vehicular networks commonly employ reactive schedulers
(React) – slowly react to the changes in bandwidth.

Using Bandwidth-Road Maps in Scheduling (BW-

MAP)
• Intelligently use location-specific a-priori bandwidth knowledge to re-
schedule flows when a vehicle enters into a new location.
• The small difference between the mean and actual bandwidth value at
a given location leads to faster adaptation.
Evaluation
• Implemented in NS-2 with proportional fair scheduler.
• 64Kbps constant bit-rate G711 encoded audio sessions.
• Poisson arrival & exponential session duration.
• Glitch: instantaneous Mean Opinion Score (MOS) is below 3.