Mobile awareness in a wide area wireless network of info-stations
Tao Ye, Hans‐Arno Jacobsen, Randy Howard Katz · 1998
Wireless networking is becoming an increasingly important communication means, yet high wide--area wireless data connectivity is difficult to achieve due to technological and physical limitations. To alleviate these problems we experiment with an alternative by placing many high bandwidth local "islands" of info--stations dispersed throughout the low bandwidth wide--area wireless network. The location and distribution of the individual stations is crucial for the network's overall effectiveness, as demonstrated by our investigations. The info--stations are deployed in a transparent manner, often not geographically visible to the user. Applications must be designed to be mobile--aware and able to account for changing network characteristics by optimally utilizing the available network resources. We simulate alternative network layouts and determine their effectiveness by experimenting with an incremental map downloading application for road travelers that uses intelligent prefetching to...