Validation of a vehicle emulation platform supporting OBD-II communications

© 2015 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.In the next few years, important developments are expected in the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) area. One of the key issues enabling future solutions is achieving an effective integration between mobile apps and vehicles. Such integration can be efficiently achieved on all existing vehicles by relying on the On Board Diagnostic (OBD-II) interface. This allows obtaining critical information such as speed, fuel consumption, gas emissions and system failures. In this paper we propose a vehicle emulation platform, called VEWE, that allows developing and testing OBD-II aware applications. The advantages of this approach include: avoiding the need for a real vehicle, allowing to easily generate realistic vehicle parameter patterns, and supporting emulated GPS functionality. We evaluate our platform by conducting a performance analysis in terms of OBD-II response times and channel capacity when relying on a Bluetooth adapter. We compare our results with respect to those obtained in real vehicles, and demonstrate that our VEWE platform behaves similarly to realistic on board devices, thereby providing a complete and reliable platform for smartphone application development.This work was partially supported by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Spain, under Grant TIN2011-27543-C03-01Alvear Alvear, Ó.; Tavares De Araujo Cesariny Calafate, CM.; Cano Escribá, JC.; Manzoni, P. (2015). Validation of a vehicle emulation platform supporting OBD-II communications. https://doi.org/10.1109/CCNC.2015.7158092

A Real-World Implementation of IoT Automobiles

Modern automobiles have many built-in sensors and electronic control units responsible for increasing safety, optimizing performance and improving occupant comfort. Along with this well-established uses of computing devices inside automobiles, there are two main research directions in further computerization of automobiles. One direction is aimed at creating vehicles that communicate with road infrastructure and other vehicles in ad hoc manner forming vehicular ad hoc network (VANET). The other research direction is expected to produce self-driving automobiles that can drive safely on the safe road together with regular automobiles. The research presented in this paper is focused on making regular automobiles connected to the Internet and thus becoming a part of the Internet of Things (IoT), with some motivating applications under consideration. In this paper a developed general architecture that enables automobiles to communicate with user applications by the help of an axillary computational infrastructure is presented and elaborated. A prototype based on the proposed architecture has been developed by putting embedded system inside an automobile. The developed system is supported by a suitable software and infrastructure that have also been developed as a part of the research. Driving tests with the prototype on real roads confirmed that proposed approach is feasible