Performance Evaluation of FILS in a Vehicular Delay/Disruption Tolerant Network

A vehicular delay/disruption tolerant network (VDTN) is efficient in keeping communications in sintuations where natural disasters, such as earthquakes and tsunami, occur. We have implemented a VDTN-based information-sharing system with multiple radio communications, such as digital convenience radio (DCR) and Wi-Fi. The information-sharing system enables firefighters and medical staff to share medical records and the state of the disaster damage via the network. The system requires to authenticate users individually to prevent falsification or circulation of incorrect information by malicious or ignorant users. WPA2-EAP is a major authentication mechanism for enterprise systems. It, however, requires many management frame exchanges to establish a secure link and reduces time to exchange data frames. Thus, we have proposed using the IEEE 802.11ai (FILS) together with WPA2-EAP for the system. In this paper, we report the results of field experiments to measure the FILS performance on a VDTN system. Our experiment results show that FILS shortens the initial link setup times between passing vehicles to around 130 ms, which is about 10 times shorter than WPA2-EAP, and FILS increases the amount of transmitted data up to around 33 MB more than using WPA2-EAP.