VanLan: Investigating connectivity from moving vehicles
Our goal is to enable cheap and high-throughput wireless connectivity to moving vehicles in urban areas. The available options for such connectivity today fall short in significant ways. Cellular networks are expensive and have low throughput. Same is likely to be true of WiMax networks if they were to become a reality. While some exisiting WiFi basestations can provide opportunistic connectivity to passing vehicles, they are unable to support longer periods of connectivity. However, WiFi deployment is becoming denser and in many cases, entire cities are being covered. But given the short range of WiFi and the presence of many interferring sources, can such deployments enable continuous, cheap, high-throughput connectivity, by themselves or in conjunction with cellular and WiMax networks?
Information on the testbed
Data sets
Talks
- High performance vehicular connectivity using opportunistic erasure coding [Usenix ATC 2012]
- Augmenting Mobile 3G using WiFi [University of Washington, Seattle]
- Using redundancy to enable interactive connectivity for moving vehicles [Keynote at WinMee 2009] [KAIST, Daejeon, South Korea] [MPI-SWS, Saarbrucken, Germany]
- Reliable wireless connectivity on the go [MS engineering excellence series]
- Interactive WiFi connectivity for moving vehicles [SIGCOMM 2008]
- Understanding WiFi Connectivity from moving vehicles [IMC 2007]
Publications
- Ratul Mahajan, Jitu Padhye, Sharad Agarwal, and Brian Zill, High performance vehicular connectivity using opportunistic erasure coding, in USENIX Annual Technical Conference, USENIX, 13 June 2012
- aruna balasubramanian, ratul mahajan, and Arun Venkataramani, Augmenting Mobile 3G with WiFi, in MobiSys 2010, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., June 2010
- Ratul Mahajan, Jitendra Padhye, Sharad Agarwal, Abhinav Jain, and Brian Zill, E PluriBus Unum: High Performance Connectivity on Buses -- Extended version, no. MSR-TR-2009-76, 19 June 2009
- Ratul Mahajan, Jitendra Padhye, Ramya Raghavendra, and Brian Zill, Eat All You Can in an All-You-Can-Eat Buffet: A Case for Aggressive Resource Usage, in HotNets-VII, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., October 2008
- Aruna Balasubramanian, Ratul Mahajan, Arun Venkataramani, Brian Levine, and John Zahorjan, Interactive WiFi Connectivity For Moving Vehicles, in ACM SIGCOMM, August 2008
- Ratul Mahajan, John Zahorjan, and Brian Zill, Understanding WiFi-based Connectivity From Moving Vehicles, in Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), November 2007
Selected press coverage
- Using WiFi to Boost 3G Capacity [research.microsoft.com]
- Software Notebook: Microsoft test-driving Wi-Fi use in vehicles [Seattle PI]
- Plan rolling to improve vehicle-based Wi-Fi nets [Network World]
- Prepare for truly Mobile WiFi [Discover magagize]
- WiFi on the highway [Daily Hampshire Gazette]
- Reliable wireless connectivity on the go [Onten.net interview]
