1. Introduction

The advance of wireless communications and pervasive use of mobile electronics in the recent years have driven the ever-increasing user demands, especially the bandwidth-hungry wireless demands, for the ubiquitous Internet access. This is particularly evident for in-vehicle Internet access with people now spending much their time in cars. By deploying a multitude of wireless gateway points along the roadside, namely roadside units (RSUs), the vehicles are possible to acquire temporary and opportunistic wireless connections to the Internet when driving through the coverage of RSUs, and accordingly enjoy the limited Internet services. Such a fundamental vehicular communication framework is referred to as the Drive-thru Internet. In this monograph, the RSU is also referred to as access point (AP). Therefore, we use RSU and AP interchangeably throughout the monograph. Compared with the Internet access services via ubiquitous connected cellular networks, Drive-thru Internet can form cost-effective, high-quality, and flexible vehicular communication networking by utilizing the technically matured Wi-Fi technology and widely deployed wireless local area networks (WLANs) communication infrastructure. The remainder of this chapter is organized as follows. Section 1.1 introduces the research background. Section 1.2 describes the basic concepts. Sections 1.3 and 1.4 discuss the challenges and contributions, respectively. Section 1.5 introduces the outline of this monograph.