Towards robust, scalable internet connectivity for public transit vehicles

In this work a vehicular connectivity solution called WiRover is presented. This solution has been designed, implemented, deployed and operating since April of 2010. WiRover has been installed on a variety of passenger buses and the system exposes a WiFi network within each vehicle to which passengers can connect. More than 50,000 unique devices have connected to WiRover as of August 11, 2013. This deployment effort has not only provided insight into the connectivity challenges within the vehicular environment but has also produced rich insight into the challenges faced by applications and end users. Two such challenges were the lack of bandwidth and non-transient link failures. This work focuses considerable attention on these two challenges.;Mitigating the lack of bandwidth as well as non-transient link failures began with the design of the WiRover architecture. The architecture was built on two primary concepts: multipath routing and a tunnel and proxy architecture. Multipath routing provided greater amounts of bandwidth into the vehicle as well as link diversity. When link diversity was coupled with a tunnel and proxy architecture it was possible to route network traffic around link failures.;This work was heavily impacted by the implementation and deployment of the WiRover system. The system's deployment onto five passenger buses enabled a long-term, systematic study of the environment. The environmental study in turn, inspired a variety of system optimizations. One such optimization, FloMiS, protected content downloads from non- transient link failures without incurring the overheads of the tunnel and proxy architecture. This optimization improved the scalability of the WiRover architecture for certain traffic types. Enhancements to the overall architecture improved system scalability further. Finally, a flexible policy and monitoring framework addressed the manageability of the deployment.