Handshake time and transmission rate of 802.11g measurement in vehicular networks

Wireless network access from moving vehicles can be challenged by many factors such as connection opportunities, mobility, handshake phase, and data sizes, etc. The handshake time and transmission rate can be influenced differently in vehicle-to-roadside networks than a static wireless LAN access. The radio signal strength changes and Doppler shift occur when the vehicle is moving. Switching among APs could cause significant connection stale, which could have a major impact on the handshake phase and transmission rate. The purpose of our paper is to enhance the understanding of these influential factors and study the feasibility of mobile vehicle access for a hybrid environment that contains sparse and dense access point deployments. Experiment data was collected in a moving vehicle, which traveled around the campus of the university. In the data analyze part, the above factors are analyzed for packet inter-arrival time, response time and transmission rate; Our main results are focused in security enabled protocols such as HTTPS and SSH, as well as TCP file transmission. Our data shows that IEEE 802.11g is still weak in supporting mobile vehicle access to the Wireless LAN. We expect that IEEE 802.11p, designed specifically for vehicle networks, can provide better mobile services.