On the Benefits of Opportunistic WiFi in Cooperative Downloading

With the increased use of software in modern vehicles, the need for updates and data communication rises. While many vehicles are equipped with cellular communication technology, monetary costs are adding up for vehicle manufacturers. Cooperative downloading is a communication scheme, in which many vehicles cooperatively download an update and share the data between them. Through the use of direct communication, only small amounts of data have to be transferred from the internet to the vehicle. Besides using cellular communication for the initial transfer of data, the opportunistic use of WiFi access points has been proposed. To accurately evaluate the usefulness of access points, it is imperative to model their availability, which requires measurement data. We have used an extensive data set and introduced a novel approach to model the reception of access points on a street network. We have shown that even reduced connectivity with the WiFi access points benefits the cooperative downloading scheme, while the deployment of direct communication in the vehicles has larger benefits for the overall update progress. However, if WiFi is used as an additional technology in a cooperative downloading scheme, even its opportunistic availability greatly improves the overall system.