Innovative approach for improving access to wireless services in high occupancy vehicles

With the maturation and acceptance of broadband wireless technology and standards (e.g. mobile WiMAX, EVDO, HSPA), forward-looking service providers are beginning to augment their coverage with new broadband wireless networks and offering new higher-speed services. At the same time, we see that on-the-go transit and ride-sharing vehicles are beginning to see a market for offering wireless access throughout a voyage. Such vehicles, however, given their aggregate bandwidth requirements, pose serious load balancing issues for service providers. Providers with multi-network deployments will be in a better position to satisfy such networked high-occupancy vehicles (HOVpsilas) and, through policies, will be able to affect admission control such that the HOVpsilas presence is accounted for. Our solution helps to solve this issue and in this paper we describe the solution components and how they interact. We also describe additional value-adding policies that will further enhance such wireless-to-HOV services.