Extending drive-thru data access by vehicle-to-vehicle relay

Recently, some researchers have performed extensive experiments to study the feasibility and performance of vehicle drive-thru access to roadside access points (APs). The experiments demonstrate that the duration of connectivity to the AP is limited. A drive-thru vehicle has an area of high signal strength near the AP, but experiences poor link quality when entering or exiting the AP coverage area. Since a vehicle spends a large portion of the connection time in this poor link quality area, the data throughput can be significantly reduced. This problem has been identified in several works, but a viable solution has yet to be identified. In this paper, we propose a vehicle-to-vehicle relay (V2VR) scheme which extends the service range of roadside APs and allows drive-thru vehicles to maintain high throughput within an extended range. Our solution is distributed and purely client-based, without any modification to the existing 802.11 APs. Through implementation and simulation, we demonstrate that the V2VR scheme can effectively extend the drive-thru access range and improve the network utilization for drive-thru vehicles.