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,  Characterize location-bandwidth dependency in vehicular mobility
wherein Wireless Wide Area Networks (WWAN) bandwidth changes fre- in the form of Bandwidth-Road Maps.
quently as the vehicle changes its location. The varying bandwidth con-  Use a priori knowledge stored in these maps to improve application
ditions directly affect quality of experience of multimedia applications. QoS in vehicular mobility scenarios.

Bandwidth-road Maps  Historical bandwidth data can be collected by repetitive measure-

 Overlay location specific bandwidth information on street maps (e.g.,
Google Maps).
 These maps can provide information such as – if you are at location X,
you can expect an average bandwidth of 1.2Mbps from provider A.
ments (active or passive).
 We have used simple hardware and packet dispersion techniques to
measure bandwidth of 3 WWAN networks (2 HSDPA & 1 pre-WiMAX)
 Measurement campaign constituted 75 repeated driving trips for 2
non-overlapped routes (Route 1 – 7Km, Route 2 – 13.5Km) 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 LAN in the vehicle. Results (averaged over 40 trips from Route 1)
 Mobile Router (MR) and Home Agent (HA) run NEMO basic protocol to
seamlessly connect the on-board LAN to Internet via multiple WWAN links.
 HA and MR schedule 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 load
on each WWAN link to adapt to the varying bandwidth.
 Commercial vehicular networks commonly employ reactive schedulers
(React), which are slow to react to the dynamic changes in bandwidth.

Using Bandwidth-Road Maps in Scheduling (BW-MAP)

 The scheduler is interfaced with pre-constructed bandwidth-road maps.
 When the vehicle enters a new location, the scheduler uses the mean
bandwidth from the maps to reschedule flows.
 Our scheme achieves faster adaptation since the actual bandwidth at
any given location is close to the mean bandwidth based on past obser-
vations at that location.

Evaluation
 NS-2 simulations of a proportional fair scheduler.
 The first 35-trip of bandwidth traces from our measurement campaign
were used to construct bandwidth-road maps.
 The remaining 40 trips are used in the simulation. In each run, we
simulate vehicle mobility, by playing back bandwidth traces of each
WWAN link from the corresponding trip.
 64Kbps CBR G711 encoded audio streaming sessions – with expo-
nential session duration (β =3min) & Poisson arrival (λ = 10flows/min).
 Glitch: instantaneous Mean Opinion Score (MOS) is below 3.