A new
algorithm lets networks of Wi-Fi-connected cars, whose layout is constantly
changing, share a few expensive links to the Internet.
(July 9, 2012) Wi-Fi is
coming to our cars. Ford Motor Co. has been equipping cars with Wi-Fi
transmitters since 2010; according to an Agence France-Presse story last year,
the company expects that by 2015, 80 percent of the cars it sells in North
America will have Wi-Fi built in. The same article cites a host of other
manufacturers worldwide that either offer Wi-Fi in some high-end vehicles or
belong to standards organizations that are trying to develop recommendations
for automotive Wi-Fi.
Two Wi-Fi-equipped cars sitting
at a stoplight could exchange information free of charge, but if they wanted to
send that information to the Internet, they’d probably have to use a paid
service such as the cell network or a satellite system. At the ACM
SIGACT-SIGOPS Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, taking place
this month in Portugal, researchers from MIT, Georgetown University and the
National University of Singapore (NUS) will present a new algorithm that would
allow Wi-Fi-connected cars to share their Internet connections. “In this
setting, we’re assuming that Wi-Fi is cheap, but 3G is expensive,” says
Alejandro Cornejo, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer
science at MIT and lead author on the paper.