.Business PathsSo where are the bus

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Business Paths

So where are the business opportunities? Cisco is pursuing many possibilities for what could be a common platform with multiple extensions. (See Fig. 1) The key features are high connectivity and speed. Security is important, but it isn’t the biggest priority for some people that Cisco works with, Devlin said. Service providers that want to have an aftermarket play represent another business opportunity.

1. For Cisco, a vehicle is just one more thing in the Internet of Things. The key engineering challenges lie in optimizing communications for speed, security, and reliability.
1. For Cisco, a vehicle is just one more thing in the Internet of Things. The key engineering challenges lie in optimizing communications for speed, security, and reliability.

In general, developers for hardware that adds IoT capabilities to vehicles need to look at the situation as a need for a generic platform. “Yes, connectivity is important. But really what we need is an open platform that allows us to securely authenticate and add new applications through which OEMs can monetize various services,” Devlin said.

“Looking beyond the feature-level layer, it helps to know what your partners are thinking about in terms of operating systems and silicon. When we work with tier-ones or auto manufacturers… there is a variety of issues that we look at. One is operating systems—what’s popular now, what’s going to change,” she said.

“For example, QNX is fairly widespread today but declining because of its association with RIM,” she said. Nevertheless, she added, QNX does have a pronounced market share in the automotive world, so it isn’t doomed. However, Linux and Android are increasing in popularity. Similarly, ARM is becoming the predominant CPU architecture because of its low-power requirements.

“When you’re building the software stack, you typically start with decisions on which CPU architecture you’re going to go with. What’s the kernel that you want to have? Then, what are the basic capabilities that are needed?” she said. “Then on top of that, what level of scalability, reliability, and extensibility must the platform provide? As an engineer, that’s how I always work. If I look at a spectrum of requirements, I imagine a Venn diagram to see what it takes to build in as much commonality as possible.”

For example, accounting for the broad constraints for a product that will allow intelligent, autonomous switching connectivity options such as multiple cellular services and mesh Wi-Fi, a team could design the part of a system that can opt for the best connection solution at any time, based on cost, reliability, and security. Devlin calls that hardware a “policy engine.”

Cisco already knows how to do that in the wired Internet. “This involves both hardwired decisions. Under these circumstances, you shall switch between these links,” she said, along with the ability to learn from what has happened in the past, being able to collect patterns of experiences that point the policy engine toward the advantages of certain kinds of links.

“For example, if you’re commuting on the 880 at 8 a.m., and you need to be at work at the Cisco campus at 9, the particular connectivity that you’d use during that time frame might be different than if you were going someplace else at midday,” she said.

“What else is needed is the ability to learn, not just from one car’s experience but from the experience of a multitude of cars, and to be able to harness that vehicular crowd source by monitoring and accumulating data on what’s happening to other vehicles and applying predictive analytics to a spectrum of situations,” she said. “That’s more than just creating a logic tree based on time of day and location.”

In other words, the experience that strangers are having in their cars a mile up the road can affect communications decisions in your car. That’s a whole new sense of community. “It’s really crowd surfing at a different level. We’ve all been frustrated on the road when we suddenly hit a traffic jam and think, ‘Gee, I wish I’d known five minutes earlier. I would’ve passed up the last exit and gone a different way,’” Devlin said.

“This is knowledge-sharing without human intervention. You don’t have to tweet or text that ‘Hey, I am stopping, and blah, blah, blah.’ Instead, every car senses that traffic has slowed down (or sped up) for them, and in effect, tweets the information by means of DSRC, not to you, not to other drivers, but to other cars,” she said. “But it will alert you too so you have control. It’s through these protocols that I spoke about, such as DSRC vehicle-to-vehicle communication, vehicle-to-infrastructure communication.”

This type of information, coupled with in-car mapping intelligence, can do more than simply let drivers know about backups so they can initiate their own alternative routings. It also can automatically access traffic information on all those alternatives and direct cars to different routes to spread the traffic load and improve travel times for every vehicle.