MRMV: Design and evaluation of a multi-radio multi-vehicle system for Metro-WiFi access

Abstract

In this work, we design and evaluate the MRMV (MultiRadio Multi-Vehicle) system for vehicular WiFi access in the 2.4 GHz band. The design essentially centers around the vehicular client that accesses typical metro-WiFi networks (V2I) under vehicular mobility. MRMV has two features that makes it unique - i) it uses multiple WiFi interfaces that intelligently associates to different APs to mask handoff latencies, (ii) it is able to use other MRMV clients as relays (V2V) and is thus able to avoid coverage holes. The V2V link uses 900 MHz interfaces for interference avoidance and better ranges. We provide extensive performance evaluation of the MRMV system using a large scale metro-WiFi deployment. We show that both connectivity (periods of non-zero throughput) and median throughputs improve substantially over default cases. Overall performance numbers indicate that the MRMV system can be an excellent platform for offloading data from cellular data networks to unlicensed bands for ubiquitous and high-throughput vehicular connectivity.