WiRover Core

WiRover is an advanced networking solution that provides robust, high-speed Internet connectivity to vehicles. WiRover was developed as a research project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The WiRover system is capable of improving the performance of vehicle-to-Internet applications by connecting to multiple different wireless network providers simultaneously. This improves the system's network performance by both increasing the bandwidth available to the system as well as increasing network diversity. Network diversity in turn increases the chances that the system will have Internet connectivity from at least one network provider when there may not be network coverage from other providers.

Introduction

This is a user-level implementation of WiRover. The WiRover architecture comprises two main components --- the gateway and the controller. It also includes a root server that handles mapping gateways to controllers in the case of large-scale multi-controller deployments.

The mobile platform with one or more managed interfaces is the gateway. Typically, the gateway is a mobile WiFi access point with multiple cellular interfaces. It is the access point for one ore more devices that require an Internet connection, hence the name gateway.

The other component, the controller, is a tunnel endpoint for the traffic sent through the gateway. Tunneling is used to implement reliable handover and performance enhancements. Typically, a controller will reside in a fixed location with a well-provisioned network and will provide service to many gateways.

Source Code

src/wiroot
src/wigateway
src/wicontroller
src/common

The source code is divided into several directories. The wi* subdirectories are specific to their respective components. The common subdirectory contains some shared code and header files.

Quick Start

The quickest way to get started is using docker-compose.

For the controller, all that is required is a Linux server with Docker and Docker Compose installed and the docker-compose.yml file from this project. The controller should have a public IP address that will be reachable by the gateways.

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/WiRover/wirover-core/master/docker-compose.yml

Start the controller software using:

docker-compose up -d

In order for the controller to proxy traffic from the gateways, we also need to enable packet forwarding and NAT.

sysctl -w net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -s 172.16.0.0/12 -j MASQUERADE

For the gateways, we recommend using Ubuntu Core, which is a lightweight version of Ubuntu with transactional updates.

If using Ubuntu Core, install the gateway software using:

snap install wigateway

Set the address of the controller and root server:

snap set wigateway wiroot-address=192.0.2.1

Other configuration settings, such as network interface priorities can be found in /var/snap/wigateway/current/wigateway.conf.

Give wigateway permission to modify network settings:

snap connect wigateway:firewall-control
snap connect wigateway:network-control
snap connect wigateway:network-observe
snap connect wigateway:network-setup-control
snap connect wigateway:network-setup-observe

Then restart the service:

snap restart wigateway

Alternatively, you can also run the gateway using Docker. Fill in the WIROVER_WIROOT_ADDRESS environment variable with the address of your server.

docker run --detach --name=wigateway --privileged --rm --env "WIROVER_WIROOT_ADDRESS=192.0.2.1" --network=host wirover/wigateway

Building

The following commands are used to build the individual Docker images for wicontroller, wigateway, and wiroot:

docker build --file src/wicontroller/Dockerfile --tag wirover/wicontroller .
docker build --file src/wigateway/Dockerfile --tag wirover/wigateway .
docker build --file src/wiroot/Dockerfile --tag wirover/wiroot .