Beyond deployments and testbeds: experiences with public usage on vehicular WiFi hotspots

We describe our experiences with deploying a vehicular Internet access service on public transit buses. Our system, called WiRover, has been running on these buses since April 2010 for about 18 months till date providing a WiFi hotspot to which bus passengers can connect. As of Dec. 1, 2011 we have observed 17,567 unique client devices connect to the WiRover system. These devices have downloaded more than 337.53 GB and uploaded 48.19 GB of content through our system. Since the initial deployment, the buses have logged more than 9,331 hours of operation and have traveled over much of the northern Midwest of the United States. Through this paper we provide different insights acquired in deploying and running a continuous service with real users, present various user and usage characteristics in these systems, discuss various design and management strategies for these networks, and explore different network traffic optimizations possible.

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