February 2015
10
S
afety
& S
ecurity
with an STA2062 multimedia processor that
handles the telematics. If danger is identified,
the driver is immediately warned to take steps
to avoid an accident. Cohda Wireless says its
technology extends driver awareness beyond
buildings that block the driver’s view, enabling
drivers to be aware of all threats.
The European Union (EU) is taking a lead-
ing role in moving the connected car from
concept to reality. Earlier this year the EU
announced that the basic set of standards to
make connected cars a reality has been fully
completed. These standards ensure that vehi-
cles made by different manufacturers will be
able to communicate with each other. The EU
says that connected cars will appear on the
continent’s roads in 2015. By then, all new
cars are expected to have built-in technol-
ogy that will allow them to automatically call
emergency services if the worst happens. If
the occupants are not conscious, the technol-
ogy will provide the vehicle location to emer-
gency services. The system will also convey
vital information to the emergency services.
At first glance the inside of the future con-
nected car won’t appear too different from
vehicles nowadays. A large human machine
interface (HMI) will likely dominate the
dash in a similar way to those in contempo-
rary high-end vehicles. And because a mod-
ern car already contains a lot of networked
electronics with proven reliability (and ben-
efiting from commodity pricing beloved of a
sector that looks to continually drive down
costs), much of that technology will remain
yet be adapted to suit connection to the IoT.
However, the adaptation required could be
considerable. Modern vehicles encompass
sophisticated networks formed from wired
and wireless elements. Electronic control
units (ECUs) - that power everything from
dashboard instruments to safety features and
powertrain components to in-vehicle info-
tainment (IVI) systems - form a key part of
these networks. The number of these devices
in the average car has doubled in the past ten
years, and many vehicles now incorporate
more than 125 separate ECUs. Today cars also
boast a swarm of sensors monitoring every-
thing from road condition, distance to the
vehicle in front, vehicle speed and accelera-
tion, and location (via GPS) to internal tem-
perature, seatbelt tension and driver alertness.
Wireless connectivity such as Bluetooth tech-
nology or Wi-Fi is typically used to connect
smartphones and tablets to the vehicle dash-
mounted HMI. Most of the other sensors in
the contemporary car, like those monitoring
powertrain, chassis, body, control and safety
use wired Controller Area Network (CAN)
or Local Interconnect Network (LIN) buses.
The instrument cluster is also connected via a
CAN bus to the network. All network connec-
tions terminate at a central gateway that super-
vises functions and can be accessed from an
external computer via an on-board diagnos-
tics data link connector (OBD DLC). Changes
to this conventional layout in an IoT-enabled
vehicle are likely to include the use of Ether-
net to link the various systems replacing CAN
and LIN buses (particularly as Ethernet has
recently been embraced by several automo-
tive OEMs for vehicle infotainment buses)
and the introduction of mini-hubs to aggre-
gate groups of sensors or ECUs to simplify the
network. Everything will still connect back to
a central-vehicle gateway that will retain the
OBD DLC, but vehicles will also incorporate
a telemetry module to look after the wireless
connectivity to the internet (“The Smart and
Connected Vehicle and the Internet of Things,”
Flavio Bonomi, Cisco Systems, 201).
While the car itself may form a thing on the
internet, the various systems and subsystems
will generate the information that will be of
most value to the IoT. A good way to con-
sider vehicle IoT connectivity is to consider
the car as a large hub to which all the systems
and subsystems of the vehicle link in order
to send and receive information to the wider
network. Today, the computational power and
intelligence required to take the raw data from
systems in the car, send it in a form that’s use-
ful to external servers, and then receive and
disseminate information coming back, resides
in the central vehicle gateway. But in the near
future automotive sensors could include tech-
nology that will allow communication directly
to servers in the cloud using the gateway sim-
ply as a dumb forwarding device. Software
such as Bluetooth v4.1 (which includes a low-
power variant Bluetooth low energy suitable
for wireless sensors) already includes foun-
dation technology that will lead to wireless
sensors with their own IP addresses commu-
nicating directly with remote devices on the
internet. Companies such as STMicroelec-
tronics, Texas Instruments and Nordic Semi-
conductor are pioneers in this field.
Electronics manufacturers have identified the
automotive segment as a lucrative opportunity
for their IoT products. But it is early days for
the technology and automotive-grade com-
ponents are thin on the ground. Nonetheless,
Intel is encouraging automotive engineers
to experiment with IoT with the introduc-
tion of its In-Vehicle Solutions Development
Kit based on the CM1050 high-performance
compute module. The company claims the kit
simplifies in-vehicle system design. Intel has
also formed an Internet of Things Solutions
Alliance with companies such as Altera, Arbor
and Greenliant in order to increase momen-
tum. And Texas Instruments is working hard
to exploit automotive IoT with its WiLink
8Q solutions. The company says the WiLink
8Q automotive wireless connectivity family
offers scalability across multiple technologies
to deliver features such as in-car multimedia
streaming video in parallel with Bluetooth
technology hands-free calling and naviga-
tion via GPS. Freescale Semiconductor is also
backing automotive IoT, putting its focus on
Linux and Android operating systems as the
basis of future vehicle software and suggest-
ing the i.MX family of automotive application
processors are a good solution for vehicle net-
work applications.
The IoT promises to improve the driving expe-
rience and save lives. However, in order to fully
unlock this potential, a wide range of barriers
need to be addressed, including security, safety,
regulation, lack of cross-industry standards,
widely varying industry dynamics and life
cycles, and limited initial addressable market
sizes. So while the future for the connected car
is undoubtedly bright, the highway to its intro-
duction is covered with speed bumps.
n
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Figure 4: Future vehicle network with Ethernet-based central-vehicle gateway and mini-hubs.
(source: Cisco Systems.)
