On the use of WiMAX and Wi-Fi to provide in-vehicle connectivity and media distribution

The recent emergence of ubiquitous wireless connectivity and the increasing computational capacity of modern vehicles have triggered immense interest in the possibilities of vehicular connectivity. A plethora of potential applications for vehicular networks have been proposed in the areas of safety, traffic infrastructure management, information, and entertainment. The broad range of applications requires creative utilization of the available wireless medium, using a combination of existing and novel wireless technologies. In this paper we evaluate one such configuration, assuming dedicated short range communication for safety applications, and using Wi-Fi and WiMAX for non-safety applications. Little is known about the media streaming performance of these wireless technologies in realistic vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) scenarios. Due to the extreme mobility and unpredictable environmental aspects in a real road environment, we perform and present an empirical evaluation. We evaluate a multi-vehicle to infrastructure (V2V2I) VANET, using Wi-Fi for the vehicle-to-vehicle communication and WiMAX for the vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communication.