TY - JOUR
T1 - Performance study of a mobile multi-hop 802.11a/b railway network using passive measurement
AU - Zhou, Ting
AU - Sharif, Hamid
AU - Hempel, Michael
AU - Mahasukhon, Puttipong
AU - Wang, Wei
AU - Chen, Hsiao Hwa
N1 - Funding Information:
This testbed which is funded by US Federal Railroad Administration, BNSF, and Union Pacific Railroads is located between Crete, NE and Berks, NE, spanning 3.5 miles along railroad track and including eight out-door APs. This particular segment was chosen because of its representative nature of real-world complications in deploying outdoor wireless networks. It features several turns, but also straight segments of track. It is in parts surrounded by dense foliage, while in others it is open and unobstructed.
Funding Information:
This work was supported by the United States Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) under Grant 25-1105 and in collaboration with BNSF and Union Pacific Railway, and Taiwan National Science Council under Grant NSC97-2219-E-006-004.
Funding Information:
Acknowledgements The authors would like to gratefully acknowledge the supports from the US Federal Railroad Administration, Union Pacific, BNSF, and CSX railroads, as well as Taiwan National Science Council.
PY - 2009/12
Y1 - 2009/12
N2 - In this paper, we study the performance of IEEE 802.11a/b in a large-scale mobile railway networks and introduce our developed passive measurement approach. To provide a comprehensive evaluation, we built an outdoor multi-hop multi-interface railroad testbed (UNL-FRA Testbed), which consists of eight access points deployed along 3.5 mile of railroad track. We propose a novel large-scale passive measurement approach that synchronizes the system clocks of our monitoring systems, merges packet traces collected from multiple wireless channels across a multi-hop network, and enables a global performance view for the entire monitored network and across multiple layers. Based on the testing data collected from 15 field experiments carried out using BNSF locomotives and HyRail vehicles over a period of 18 months we conclude that in typical outdoor 802.11 railway environments the wireless link quality, the channel assignment scheme, and the handoff latency have much more significant impacts on the performance than the velocity. Furthermore, we discuss the implications of our conclusions on guaranteeing the quality of mobile services. We believe this is the first analysis on such a scale for 802.11-family railway networks.
AB - In this paper, we study the performance of IEEE 802.11a/b in a large-scale mobile railway networks and introduce our developed passive measurement approach. To provide a comprehensive evaluation, we built an outdoor multi-hop multi-interface railroad testbed (UNL-FRA Testbed), which consists of eight access points deployed along 3.5 mile of railroad track. We propose a novel large-scale passive measurement approach that synchronizes the system clocks of our monitoring systems, merges packet traces collected from multiple wireless channels across a multi-hop network, and enables a global performance view for the entire monitored network and across multiple layers. Based on the testing data collected from 15 field experiments carried out using BNSF locomotives and HyRail vehicles over a period of 18 months we conclude that in typical outdoor 802.11 railway environments the wireless link quality, the channel assignment scheme, and the handoff latency have much more significant impacts on the performance than the velocity. Furthermore, we discuss the implications of our conclusions on guaranteeing the quality of mobile services. We believe this is the first analysis on such a scale for 802.11-family railway networks.
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U2 - 10.1007/s11036-008-0127-4
DO - 10.1007/s11036-008-0127-4
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:70450235474
VL - 14
SP - 782
EP - 797
JO - Mobile Networks and Applications
JF - Mobile Networks and Applications
SN - 1383-469X
IS - 6
ER -