From the June 2013 issue

Measurement-Based Design of Roadside Content Delivery Systems

Vinod Kone, Haitao Zheng, Antony Rowstron, Greg O'Shea, & Ben Y. Zhao

With today's ubiquity of thin computing devices, mobile users are accustomed to having rich location-aware information at their fingertips, such as restaurant menus, shopping mall maps, movie showtimes, and trailers. However, delivering rich content is challenging, particularly for highly mobile users in vehicles. Technologies such as cellular-3G provide limited bandwidth at significant costs. In contrast, providers can cheaply and easily deploy a small number of WiFi infostations that quickly deliver large content to vehicles passing by for future offline browsing. While several projects have proposed systems for disseminating content via roadside infostations, most use simplified models and simulations to guide their design for scalability. Many suspect that scalability with increasing vehicle density is the major challenge for infostations, but few if any have studied the performance of these systems via real measurements. Intuitively, per-vehicle throughput for unicast infostations degrades with the number of vehicles near the infostation, while broadcast infostations are unreliable, and lack rate adaptation. In this work, we collect over 200 h of detailed highway measurements with a fleet of WiFi-enabled vehicles. We use analysis of these results to explore the design space of WiFi infostations, in order to determine whether unicast or broadcast should be used to build high-throughput infostations that scale with device density.

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Editorials and Announcements

Announcements

• IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing Seeks New Editor in Chief for 2014-2015 Term
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• TMC is transitioning to the OnlinePlus publication model starting with 2012 issues.

Editorials

• Editorial and Changes to the Editorial Board (Jan. 2012)
• Editorial (Dec. 2011)
• Changes to TMC and its Editorial Board (May 2011)
• A Message from the New Editor-in-Chief (January 2011)

Guest Editorials

• Special Section on Outstanding Papers from MobiCom 2011 (Sept. 2012)
• Special Section on Outstanding Papers from DySPAN 2011 (Feb. 2012)

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