Experimental validation of cooperative approach near road side units

This paper reports an experimental validation of the feasibility of cooperative approach for extending the coverage of vehicular-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication using our software platform named Airplug. Although the access time between a vehicle and a roadside unit (RSU) providing Internet access is limited in the real-world condition, our field trials demonstrate that it is extended by just passing by an RSU with forming a convoy of five vehicles installed Airplug. An overview of our software design and experimental setup is described, and discussed together with results using a WiFi access point (AP) as the RSU. Our field results show that the minimum of increased access time of our cooperative approach is always longer than the maximum of the access time of the single-vehicle case, even though the coverage varies.