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%.

The increasing demand from passengers in vehicles to improve safety, traffic efficiency, and comfort has lead to the growing interest of Wi-Fi based vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications. Although the V2I system provides fast and cost-effective Internet connectivity to vehicles via roadside Wi-Fi access points (APs), it suffers from frequent handoffs due to the high mobility of vehicles and the limited coverage of Wi-Fi APs. Recently, the Mobile AP (MAP) platform has emerged as a promising solution that overcomes the problem in the V2I systems. The main advantage is that MAPs may yield longer service duration to the nearby vehicles that have similar mobility patterns, yet they provide smaller link capacities than the roadside APs. In this paper, we present a new association control technique that harnesses available connection duration as well as achievable link bandwidth in high-speed vehicular network environments. We also analyze the tradeoff between two association metrics, namely, available connection duration and achievable link bandwidth. Extensive simulation studies based on real traces demonstrate that our scheme significantly outperforms the previous methods.

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