Wi-fi goes to town: Rapid picocell switching for wireless transit networks

Zhenyu Song, Longfei Shangguan, Kyle Jamieson

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

19 Scopus citations

Abstract

This paper presents the design and implementation of Wi-Fi Goes to Town, the first Wi-Fi based roadside hotspot network designed to operate at vehicular speeds with meter-sized picocells. Wi-Fi Goes to Town APs make delivery decisions to the vehicular clients they serve at millisecond-level granularities, exploiting path diversity in roadside networks. In order to accomplish this, we introduce new buffer management algorithms that allow participating APs to manage each others' queues, rapidly quenching each others' transmissions and flushing each others' queues. We furthermore integrate our fine-grained AP selection and queue management into 802.11's frame aggregation and block acknowledgement functions, making the system effective at modern 802.11 bit rates that need frame aggregation to maintain high spectral efficiency. We have implemented our system in an eight-AP network alongside a nearby road, and evaluate its performance with mobile clients moving at up to 35 mph. Depending on the clients' speed, Wi-Fi Goes to Town achieves a 2.4-4.7× TCP throughput improvement over a baseline fast handover protocol that captures the state of the art in Wi-Fi roaming, including the recent IEEE 802.11k and 802.11r standards.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationSIGCOMM 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages322-334
Number of pages13
ISBN (Electronic)9781450346535
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 7 2017
Event2017 Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication, SIGCOMM 2017 - Los Angeles, United States
Duration: Aug 21 2017Aug 25 2017

Publication series

NameSIGCOMM 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication

Other

Other2017 Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication, SIGCOMM 2017
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityLos Angeles
Period8/21/178/25/17

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Signal Processing
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering
  • Communication

Keywords

  • Handover
  • Transit Networks
  • Wi-Fi

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