Increasing wide-area download throughputs on the roads by trunking multiple cellular channels over a vehicular ad hoc network

0140-3664/$ see front matter 2008 Elsevier B.V. A doi:10.1016/j.comcom.2008.10.011 * Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (S.Y. Wa To obtain infotainment services (e.g., traffic, maps, accidents, weather, etc.) on the roads, vehicle drivers and back-seat passengers may want to use wide-area networks (e.g., GPRS) to download useful information from the Internet when needed. In this paper, we design and implement a scheme to increase GPRS download throughput for a vehicle user while he (she) is moving on the roads. This scheme integrates inter-vehicle communication with trunking mechanisms to achieve this goal. This scheme can be readily deployed for any real-world GPRS network or any 3G network without any support from the network operator. Our field trial results show that when this scheme is applied in a motorcade of four vehicles and all of the GPRS channel provided by each vehicle are used to download a file simultaneously, the download speed is 3.92 times faster than that achieved when only one GPRS channel is used. 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.