Wi-Fi Assist: Enhancing Vehicular Wi-Fi Connectivity with an Infrastructure-driven Approach

Abstract

Vehicles access the Internet via cellular networks, instead of Wi-Fi networks. This choice has been mostly justified by the ubiquitous coverage of cellular networks: Wi-Fi coverage has been shown to be inadequate in the past, even in urban areas. We argue that providing Internet connectivity to vehicles via Wi-Fi is worth a revisit. Motivated by improvements in Wi-Fi network coverage in recent years, we propose Wi-Fi Assist, an add-on to current Wi-Fi infrastructures which differs from existing solutions in two key ways: (1) it is heavily infrastructure-driven; and (2) defines an interface for low-latency cooperation between different WLAN service sets, managed by different service providers.