Public transport (PT) systems, including buses, taxis, trains, ships and airplanes, are used daily by millions of people worldwide, ranging from regular commuters in metropolitan areas to long-distance business and leisure travellers. The ability to communicate and access information during travel is becoming increasingly crucial to maintain productivity or provide entertainment for PT passengers. However, despite phenomenal advances in mobile wireless networking technologies in recent years, commercial deployments of special networking solutions to support PT passengers remain scarce (except in airplanes). For the most part, mobile end users can only communicate by connecting directly to their individual wireless service providers. This prevailing situation offers a very limited and often inadequate support for the wide range of applications and needs of PT passengers, such as broadcast of multimedia entertainment and travel-related updates, and interactive multiplayer games. Additionally, networking support to PT vehicles is necessary to enable other PT-specific applications that do not directly involve the passengers, such as real-time surveillance, remote telemetry, and management of PT-specific road infrastructure (e.g. traffic lights on priority bus lanes and rail crossings). All of these require the deployment of integrated on-board network solutions to connect between passengers, content/application servers and other vehicle-mounted devices, neighboring vehicles, roadside infrastructure, and the Internet. Moreover, some inherent features of PT, such as the repetitiveness and predictability of routes and timetables, can be used to design specialized network protocols to further improve the quality of service perceived by PT passengers.

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