Feasibility study of using mobile gateways for providing internet connectivity in public transportation vehicles

The extension of Internet services to public transport passengers is slowly becoming inevitable. Several architectures for providing Internet access to moving vehicles have been evaluated in the past. However, most of these studies have focused on using static gateways. In this paper, we study the feasibility of an architecture that involves deploying mobile gateways on a selected subset of public transport vehicles for providing Internet connectivity to the entire fleet. The vehicles organize as dynamic clusters and connect to the Internet by communicating with the gateways via multi-hop paths. We evaluate the underlying connectivity characteristics and the coverage achieved by employing an optimal gateway placement strategy. In our analysis, we use realistic movement patterns of public transport buses in a metropolitan city. We also propose a prediction based enhancement, which takes advantage of the known mobility patterns of the buses to improve the performance of the multi-hop routing protocols employed within each cluster.