SWIMMING: Seamless and Efficient WiFi-Based Internet Access from Moving Vehicles

Demand for Internet access from moving vehicles has been rapidly growing. Meanwhile, the overloading issue of cellular networks is escalating due to mobile data explosion. Thus, WiFi networks are considered as a promising technology to offload cellular networks. However, there pose many challenging problems in highly dynamic vehicular environments for WiFi networks. For example, connections can be easily disrupted by frequent handoffs between access points (APs). A scheme, called SWIMMING, is proposed to support seamless and efficient WiFi-based Internet access for moving vehicles. In uplink, SWIMMING operates in a “group unicast” manner. All APs are configured with the same MAC and IP addresses, so that packets sent from a client can be received by multiple APs within its transmission range. Unlike broadcast or monitor mode, group unicast exploits the diversity of multiple APs, while keeping all the advantages of unicast. To avoid possible collisions of ACKs from different APs, the conventional ACK decoding mechanism is enhanced with an ACK detection function. In downlink, a packet destined for a client is first pushed to a group of APs through multicast. This AP group is maintained dynamically to follow the moving client. The packet is then fetched by the client. With the above innovative design, SWIMMING achieves seamless roaming with reliable link, high throughput, and low packet loss. Testbed implementation and experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the ACK detection function. Extensive simulations are carried out to evaluate the performance of SWIMMING. Experimental results show that SWIMMING outperforms existing schemes remarkably.