Throughput evaluation for cooperative drive-thru Internet using microscopic mobility model

The recent advances in wireless communication techniques have made possible for vehicles to download from the roadside communications infrastructure, namely drive-thru Internet. However, due to the fast-motions, harsh and intermittent wireless channels, the download volume of individual vehicles per drive-thru is quite limited as observed in real-world tests. This severely restricts the service quality of upper-layer applications, such as file download and video streaming. To address this issue, we take a historical approach by evaluating the integrated download throughput of a cooperative vehicle group in the highway environment. In specific, we first introduce a practical microscopic vehicular mobility model, which takes the randomness of speed update and safety distance requirement into account. Then, we analyze and formulate the number of contending vehicles within the coverage range of access point (AP) in the single-lane highways scenario, which can also be easily extended into the multi-lane highways scenario. Furthermore, we derive the data download volume by a vehicle per drive-thru, and analyze the relationship between the mobility speed and the data download volume. Finally, we derive the number of cooperative vehicles required for completing a download task in our investigated highways drive-thru Internet. The analytical model and evaluation results provide general guidance for cooperative content distribution and protocol design in drive-thru Internet.