Vehicular mesh networks for infotainment content delivery: The Carmesh perspective

Low cost and high bandwidth Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) can be seen as an attractive technology to provide Infotainment services in metropolitan areas. Many network operators and city authorities deploy mesh networks to enable Internet access for visitors and local citizens, but they do not offer any dedicated services. One of the main problems in delivering such services to mobile users (drivers, passengers, pedestrians) is the reliability and performance of the data transfer and high cost of service deployment. This paper describes a flexible service architecture, which was designed for highly mobile vehicular mesh network environments. The proposed architecture takes advantage of dedicated network mechanisms and cloud computing technologies to achieve reliable telematics services provisioning, while offering enhanced functionality, low cost and ease of deployment.