Broadband Wireless Communication in Vehicles

Authors Tom Van Leeuwen, Ingrid Moerman, Hendrik Rogier, Bart Dhoedt, Daniël De Zutter, Piet Demeester Ghent University, Belgium Contact: Ingrid Moerman Department of Information Technology (INTEC), Ghent University – IMEC, Sint Pietersnieuwstraat 41 B-9000 Ghent, Belgium. Tel: +32 9 267 35 73 Fax: +32 9 267 35 99 Email: [email protected] Today our society is struggling more and more with environmental and economical problems related to the ever-increasing traffic on our highways and in our cities. The resulting traffic jams give rise to waste of time and money and are polluting our environment at a rapid pace. As a result, carpooling and public transport will be strongly encouraged by governments and industry. In order to make this more attractive to the frequent commuter, novel technologies for providing virtual offices or virtual homes in vehicles need to be developed. In order to provide high-bit-rate interactive multimedia services to fast-moving mobile users, one has to reuse the limited radio spectrum as efficiently as possible. This is made possible by using a cellular network with very small cells resulting in a high reuse factor of the frequency spectrum. This will result however in frequent handovers (typically every few seconds) because mobile devices may move very fast, crossing many cell boundaries. This paper discusses the major issues related to broadband wireless communication in vehicles, with special emphasis on the handover protocols and smart antennas and their influence on the quality of service (QoS) of the offered services.