Information raining and optimal link-layer design for mobile hotspots

In this paper, we propose a link layer design for mobile hotspots. We design a novel system architecture that enables high-speed Internet access in railway systems. The proposed design uses a number of repeaters placed along the track and multiple antennas installed on the roof of a vehicle. Each packet is decomposed into smaller fragments and relayed to the vehicle via adjacent repeaters. We also use erasure coding to add parity fragments to original data. This approach is called information raining since fragments are rained upon the vehicle from adjacent repeaters. We investigate two instances of information raining. In blind information raining, all repeaters awaken when they sense the presence of the vehicle. The fragments are then blindly transmitted via awakened repeaters. A vehicle station installed inside the train is responsible for aggregating a large enough number of fragments. In the throughput-optimized information raining, the vehicle station selects a bipartite matching between repeaters and roof-top antennas and activates only a subset of the repeaters. It also dictates the amount of transmission power of each activated repeater. Both the bipartite matching and power allocations are individually shown to be NP-complete. Matching heuristics based on the Hungarian algorithm and Gale-Shapley algorithm are proposed. A simplex-type algorithm is proposed as the power allocation heuristics.