Wi-Fi Assist: Enhancing Vehicular Wi-Fi Connectivity with an Infrastructure-driven Approach

Vehicles access the Internet via cellular networks, instead ofWi-Fi networks. This choice has been mostly justified by the ubiquitous coverage of cellular networks: Wi-Fi coverage has been shown to be inadequate in the past, even in urban areas. We argue that providing Internet connectivity to vehicles via WiFi is worth a revisit. Motivated by improvements inWi-Fi network coverage in recent years, we proposeWi-Fi Assist, an add-on to currentWi-Fi infrastructureswhich differs fromexisting solutions in two key ways: (1) it is heavily infrastructure-driven; and (2) defines an interface for low-latency cooperation between differentWLAN service sets, managed by different service providers.