LoadingZones: leveraging street parking to enable vehicular internet access

Abstract

Internet connectivity is nowadays an ubiquitous service. However, on the road we obtain access using costly and limited data cellular network subscriptions. This, along with significant network congestion, severely limits network use. Opportunistic access to indoor APs is limited by three factors. First, establishing a link to an AP requires a significant amount of time, and, second, links on the street usually have poor quality. Third, the lifetime of this link is very short in a moving car, due to indoor APs generally covering small areas of the street. Combined, these factors thwart opportunistic use of APs for Internet access. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that leverages the large number of parked cars to separate these three factors and tackle them independently: a parked car can connect to an AP with a link that, despite its poor quality, has a long lifetime. A moving vehicle can instead benefit from the better link with a parked car and use it as a relay. As our experiments show, our approach enables the use of this free, high throughput channel for a number of non time-sensitive applications, thus reducing cost and the load on the cellular network.