A heterogeneous short-range communication platform for Internet of Vehicles

Abstract

The automotive industry is rapidly accelerating toward the development of innovative industry applications that feature management capabilities for data and applications alike in cars. In this regard, more internet of vehicles solutions are emerging through advancements of various wireless medium access-control technologies and the internet of things. In the present work, we develop a short-range communication–based vehicular system to support vehicle communication and remote car control. We present a combined hardware and software testbed that is capable of controlling a vehicle’s start-up, operation and several related functionalities covering various vehicle metric data. The testbed is built from two microcontrollers, Arduino and Raspberry Pi 3, each of which individually controls certain functions to improve the overall vehicle control. The implementation of the heterogeneous communication module is based on the IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.15 medium access control technologies. Further, a control module on a smartphone was designed and implemented for efficient management. Moreover, we study the system connectivity performance by measuring various important parameters including the coverage distance, signal strength, download speed and latency. This study covers the use of this technology setup in different geographical areas over various time spans.