If a car needs information directly from the Internet, it does need to access a fixed communication tower or hotspot — or it must talk with other cars that have accessed the Internet. Just last week, team members drove around the Los Angeles area to determine how many open access points a car could tap into at any given time. They discovered that there were, on average, 30.
But if a driver is looking for a movie or map already stored on another vehicle's computer, no access to the Internet is needed.
"In some applications a car just needs Internet content, say a local map or picture…then, the car can get the data secondhand from another car that was earlier connected to the Internet and happened to have downloaded that map or picture," said Gerla.
Other groups are also working on mobile networks, but Pau and Gerla see three main advantages to their approach.
First, thanks to a collaboration with the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Istituto Boella in Torino, Italy, the UCLA researchers can simulate realistic traffic scenarios on a very large scale and can thus fine-tune the software based on such models.
They are also testing distinct types of mobile network patterns, such as those designed specifically for emergency workers.
But other mobile networking groups will still benefit. The group will be opening up their test bed to the scientific community at large, giving other research groups the opportunity to test their own applications.
"Automakers have their own simulations, but these simulations are internal and it's very unlikely that they would be made available to the academic community," said Liviu Iftode, associate professor of computer science at Rutgers University in Piscataway, NJ.
