A theoretical approach to optimal association control in vehicular Wi-Fi networks

作者:Hwang Jaeryong; Choi Jaehyuk; Yoo Joon; Kim Chong kwon*
来源:EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, 2014, 2014(1): 192.
DOI:10.1186/1687-1499-2014-192

摘要

The recent ubiquitous deployment of Wi-Fi access points (APs) has offered vehicles to use the high-speed and low-cost Internet service via the roadside APs. However, the high mobility of vehicles and the limited coverage of APs render some challenges. First, it results in frequent handoffs, thus leading to long delay and low service availability. Second, the available AP sets and their channel quality change dynamically, making the AP selection problem even harder. Therefore, there is a strong need to develop an efficient association control mechanism that provides efficient vehicular Wi-Fi access. In this paper, we present a theoretical framework to formulate the optimal association problem through non-linear integer programming, whose objective function is to maximize the throughput or to minimize the handoff overhead. We show that this problem holds the totally unimodular (TU) property and is thus solvable in polynomial time. Then, we study the optimality of association control by comparing existing online algorithms through real trace-based simulations. The results show that there exists a large performance gap between the performance of existing online algorithms and the optimal one. We also observe that the association control algorithm can be further improved if it has access to future knowledge. Particularly, the offline optimal with future AP information improves the performance of the local optimal by up to 10%.

  • 出版日期2014-11-17
  • 单位中国人民解放军海军大连舰艇学院

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