Throughput Analysis of Vehicular Internet Access via Roadside WiFi Hotspot

Roadside WiFi network has been widely considered for the drive-thru internet access. However, the data throughput is significantly affected by the access procedure that includes the steps of association, user authentication and assignment of network parameters such as internet protocol address. In this paper, we investigate the throughput performance of the drive-thru internet considering the impact of the access procedure. Particularly, a three-dimensional Markov model is proposed to analyze the relationship between the vehicle's location and the accomplishment of the access procedure that involves the exchange of the management frames under different conditions, such as number of contending WiFi clients, number of management frames, their drop rate due to channel error, etc. We also study two access schemes, namely Hotspot 2.0 and WPA2-PSK, to show how different access protocols can affect the throughput performance. We conduct extensive simulations to validate our analysis, which could provide provident insight for future development of vehicular networks.