Search

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 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the key features of high speed WLAN such as 802.11n is the use of MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) antenna technology. The MIMO channel is described with fine granularity by Channel State Information (CSI) that can be utilized in many ways to improve network performance. Many complex parameters of a MIMO system require numerous samples to obtain CSI for all possible channel configurations. As a result, measuring the complete CSI space requires excessive sampling overhead and thus degrades network performance. We propose CSI-SF (CSI Sampling & Fusion), a method for estimating CSI for every MIMO configuration by sampling a small number of frames transmitted with different settings and extrapolating data for the remaining settings. For instance, we predict CSI of multi-stream settings using CSI obtained only from single stream packets. We evaluate the effectiveness of CSI-SF in various scenarios using our 802.11n testbed and show that CSI-SF provides an accurate, complete knowledge of the MIMO channel with reduced overhead from traditional sampling. We also show that CSI-SF can be applied to network algorithms such as rate adaptation, antenna selection and association control to significantly improve their performance and efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Embedded sensors in mobile devices such as cars and smart phones present new opportunities to collect location-specific data about an environment. This data can be used to enable new real-time location-based applications. A major challenge is efficiently collecting, storing and sharing the data. This paper proposes Locus, a location-based data overlay for DTNs. Locus keeps objects at specific physical locations in the network using whatever devices currently are nearby. Nodes copy objects between themselves to maintain the locality of data. Location utility functions prioritize objects for replication and enable location-based forwarding of data look-ups. As a first-of-its-kind application, Locus is compared against other possible replication policies and shown to achieve query success rates nearly 4 times higher than other approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]