Use Cases for Indian Scenarios

Connected Cars

Abstract1. Introduction2. Use Cases for Connected Cars 2.1 Connectivity on Wheels 2.1.1 Connected Bus 2.1.2 Ubiquitous Broker 2.1.3 Business Model 2.2 E- Healthcare using Connected Cars 2.2.1 Remote Doctor 2.2.2 Business Model 2.3 Mobile Education using Connected Cars 2.3.1 Connected Classrooms 2.3.2 Business Model3. Challenges 3.1 Link Speed 3.2 Access Delays 3.3 Spatial Aspects 3.4 Modular Design 3.5 Creating an Ecosystem 3.6 Security4 Summary5 ReferencesAuthor Info

Table of Contents

In a world of ubiquitous communication, people are more connected and mobile than ever before. Connect-ed Cars is one such example stemming from a user’s need to remain connected, even when on the move. A Connected Car is a car (or any moving vehicle) that is equipped with infrastructure to access external networks, maybe via wireless local networks, for example. This allows the car to share internet access to other devices both inside and outside the vehicle. Typically, such a car will have an Integrated Unit fitted with wireless devices and interfaces, to which end user devices like Smartphones, Laptops, etc., are connected (Figure 1). The wireless interface is used to get connected to a wireless network, which in-turn acts as a con-duit to get connected to an external network.Connected Cars can not only change the way people travel but also shape how businesses are run. The advertisement industry could get a new platform for revenue generation. The healthcare industry could close the distance barrier between doctors and patients. The education industry could bridge the gap between the quality of education in rural and urban populations. Traffic management could get a lot easier in future mega cities.This paper highlights some of those areas in light of both developing and developed economies. Case stud-ies are provided for the transport, healthcare, and education sectors, and the underlying challenges / open issues are discussed for each use case

‘Connected Cars’ has been a concept that has been investigated and prototyped for quite some time now. The technological aspects of a connected car involving how the devices inside the car can be connected with the computing and application servers, and the use of computing power to access real time information and data, is well understood. Using high speed connectivity like LTE (Long Term Evolution) inside the car to provide seamless connectivity and mobility is increasing, coupled with cloud computing infrastructure. Capi-talizing on these various building blocks, this paper tries to explain a few use cases of connected cars, with particular relevance to India. Use cases are covered for applications in the field of transport, healthcare, and education. Business models are discussed in each of these applications to bring understanding on the vari-ous players involved in these scenarios. Major challenges are explained and the conclusion provides the next steps for how to take this discussion further. The paper also covers the significant characteristics of the wire-less network and the cloud computing system, the challenges involved, and the business issues. The paper focuses on how the next generation car can evolve into a sophisticated device, providing multiple services and how companies - like service providers, the auto-industry, content providers, and computing platform vendors can integrate themselves to achieve a common vision.

1. Introduction

Abstract

In this section, we describe two use cases for connectivity on wheels, specific to the Indian context. Our belief is that these use cases are scenarios that can trigger application and business propositions across vendors who are

2. Use Cases for Connected Cars

2.1 Connectivity on Wheels

Figure 1. Connected Car and its interfaces

Integrated unit of car fitted withwireless (say LTE) device and interfaces

wirelessnetwork

End user devices areconnected using802.11g or throughUSB port

ContentResidesSmart

phoneLaptop PDA

ServiceProvider GW

cloudserver

wirelessPacket core

IP

2.1.1 Connected Bus

2.1.2 Ubiquitous Broker

The second use case is the concept of the “Ubiquitous Broker”. In this case, imagine a stock broker, who is traveling in Mumbai and is trading in the Bombay Stock Exchange. The stock broker is very sensitive to price fluctuations on the stock exchange, and desires an up-to-date status, even when traveling. By a combina-tion of high speed network connectivity and cloud computing, it is possible for the broker to get the current information on stock prices and he/she will be able to trade even when on the move (see Figure 2). Hence, his/her connected car could become a virtual office.

Consider a scenario where a lot of people travel by high-tech luxury buses for long distances. During the journey, passengers pass their time by watching movies in the bus but literally have no choice about what they would like to watch or listen to.

In the “Connected Bus” scenario, assume that each passenger has a small smart screen in front of his/her seat, which is connected to the cloud via wireless connectivity available in the bus. This allows a whole new set of applications that each passenger can access - be it entertainment, net surfing, or even, work. People can watch movies, or the news, or play interactive games – of their own choice.

This type of connectivity is also helpful in bus-to-bus communication, where a bus breakdown can be com-municated to another bus and the necessary action can be taken to transport stranded passengers. Typical-ly, on highways there are traffic congestions owing to accidents and other reasons. In such cases, bus-to-bus communicationcan help drivers navigate alternate routes.

This use case brings out a business model where a wireless network operator could have a tie up with the busoperator, and they both can have an agreement with a cloud computing vendor. Based on the demographic pattern of the people, movies of choice can be played by the vendors with a discount provided to the bus operator, thereby providing bulk discounts and increasing the revenue.

Let us take the first use case where the bus passenger requests a movie of his choice. The content provider inthe cloud interacts with the wireless service provider based on the location of the passenger; and since this request is originating from a bus, the wireless service provider provides a QoS (Quality of Service) tunnel to the passenger, based on the agreement between the bus operator and the service provider. Once the trans-port characteristics are setup, the content provider can stream the required application to the passenger.(-See Figure 3 for more details).

2.1.3 Business Model

wireless serviceprovider

luxurybus

ComputeCloud

Storagecloud

Broker

Similarly, in the second scenario, the broker bids for a stock and sends out his negotiated value based on the value provided by the directory service in the cloud. This triggers the banking infrastructure or stock service to provide a transport QoS. This can be made possible by interacting with the wireless service provider to facilitate secure media transport. The bid is translated in to a transaction which is responded to by the banking service, and the deal is struck.In both these scenarios, the storage and computing cloud can be provided by cloud computing vendors, who can loan out storage and computing power as services to the other players in these transactions.

Luxury Bus StorageServer

WirelessProvider

ContentProvider

Transaction frompassenger

Request toContent Providerfor live streaming

Negatiations forstorage spacebased onagreement

Negotiations forOos parametersbased onagreement

Request forstorage space forthe registeredsubscriber

Grant of storagespace

Live streamingprovided

Start of interactive session

Healthcare is one of those critical areas where the advantages of this concept can help provide critical,on-the-move medical services for both developing and developed economies. Medical emergencies like road accidents, heart ailments, etc., can be diagnosed on the run, without delay. Apart from medical emer-gencies, the connected car can be used as a mobile hospital or e-Healthcare center that provides medical care to the masses in remote or rural areas.

2.2 E- Healthcare using Connected Cars

Patient data can be maintained at the cloud server and can be made accessible anywhere and at any time ifsufficient connectivity is provided. For example, a traveling medical consultant in a connected vehicle canaccess patient data, and so also can a specialist doctor in the hospital (see Figure 4). The service providergateway facilitates access to the database from the cloud server using APIs. The security and integrity of thedata is managed by the service provider along with other user authentication mechanisms. The connected car can access the service provider gateway using the nearest wireless network.

2.2.1 Remote Doctor

Connected Car equippedwith healthcare facility

Wireless Network

Doctor in CityHospital

Wireless ServiceProviderCloud computing

Facility

PatientDatabaseManager

Consider an example where a connected car, which is a mobile hospital, reaches a remote area where apatient is located. The medical consultant in the mobile hospital then connects the patient to the doctorthrough an interactive video session. The doctor can then do a real time diagnosis of the patient’s conditionusing the medical history of the patient available from the cloud server. Based on the doctor’s findings, theconsultant can even do minor operations / surgeries and provide prescriptive treatment and more.This approach proves very useful in cases of epidemics, minor surgeries, and diagnosis based on laser tech-nology.Another great advantage is that the treatment can be made available in less time and larger numbersof patients can be treated with a limited number of specialist doctors. In cases of epidemics like the swine flu, this kind of approach provides a very promising solution. Accessibility to specialists, consultants, and hospitals is a major concern, especially in developing economies like India. A large population remains devoid of better healthcare facilities. Since wireless network provides a wide coverage area, the connected car can provide healthcare facilities to a good number of towns and cities. A high speed network at the edge of a major city can connect to most adjacent towns and country sides so that a large number of towns and villages can be connected using few of such connected cars. These cars can also be connected between themselves and can always be connected to major hospitals to address hundreds of patients on a daily basis.

WirelessNetwork

Gateway(with charging

Function)

Hospital/Doctor

Cloud (withchargingfunction)

Appserver

LTE sensors(inside car)

WIRELESSDEVICE

Negotiation ofpartners

Request forhealthcare

service

Request madeto service

provider GW

API Based interfaceService Provider GW-

Cloud Server

Requestforwarded to

doctor

Request forhealthcare

service

Request madeto service

provider GW

APT basedinterface

hospital cloud

An end-to-end collaborative approach to innovation and technology development is required for providingconnected car-based e-Healthcare solutions. The evolution of a business model will benefit the medical fraternity, the auto industry, product developers, service providers and end consumers while at the same timereducing the socio-economic gap between the developed and developing geographies.A service provider can charge the end-user, based on the content used, and the cloud vendor can charge the service provider as well as the end-user. Figure 5 illustrates the role of various players in transactions using wireless networks and cloud servers. These solutions will be cost-effective and provide ample growth opportunities to each partner involved. While the creation of such ecosystems might bring technical, cultural and business challenges, ecosystem initiatives like ngConnect [1] are vital to drive collaborative and innova-tive ideas to realize these ideas in the country

2.2.2 Business Model

In the education industry, there is a dearth of teachers, infrastructure, and money compounded with the chal-lenge of distances between schools and students. Connected cars, powered by high speed infrastructure, can reduce these gaps. In rural areas, this concept can be used to provide primary education to children and the needy. In urban areas it can be used to improve the quality of education. This concept can be furtherextended to educate a specific section like farmers, in order to improve crop production nation-wide.

2.3 Mobile Education using Connected Cars

EPs can collect fee from end user and giveit to SPGs and UCSs

ServiceProviderGateway(SPG)

WirelessNetwork

Connected CarCamera

Projector

Camera

Projector

Education Provider /Goverment (EP)

Universities /Colleges /Schools (UCS))

Connected cars installed with a projector and camera - where a live video streaming from an actual class canbe displayed on the projector screen - can act as virtual classrooms in rural areas. Classes from a real class-room in an urban location can be live streamed to students attending virtual classrooms in rural areas usinga wireless backbone. A faculty can teach and take questions in real time to/from students attending suchvirtual classes with the help of connected cars. With ubiquitous high speed networks that provide enoughbandwidth for rich media services, such long distance classes can get a boost, because the cost of equip-ment in terms of design and cost of parts – will decline dramatically as the economies of scale become feasi-ble. A connected car can be provided to a group of villages, which can be sponsored by public-private part-nerships. Providing a connected car to a village is far easier, less time consuming, and infrastructurally moreviable than building infrastructure and finding good teachers for each such facilities. The power of cloud computing and fast accessibility through wireless networks can broadcast online classes in real-time, which will give an almost real life class experience.

2.3.1 Connected Classrooms

No business can sustain if it is not economically beneficial. The end user i.e. students will definitely be bene-fited by easy access to quality classrooms. They do not need to travel long distances and also get a betterquality of education. In India, there are over 6 lakh villages. Thus rural areas, due to the enormous size, canprovide huge business opportunities. Education providers will be the key entity in the model who can bring all the other stakeholders together, such as service providers, and schools/colleges on the same platform. Education providers can take care of all the charges that are required for service provider networks and work as a bridge between schools/colleges and students. Schools/colleges/universities can have greater outreach when they work via the education providers, which means growth in revenues for them. Service providers will provide the back-bone of the communication i.e. LTE connection. These telecom companies will benefit from this new arena of revenues. A use diagram describing the role of various players involved in this business model, is shown in Figure 7.

2.3.2 Business Model

3. Challenges

Many of us are mobile in some sense, and we are expected to be wireless; we want to be wireless and we havebecome dependent on wireless, regardless of where we are. If all our applications and data are accessi-ble from anywhere, frequent travelers would not have to worry about downloading the necessary files beforemoving off to yet another customer meeting. The major challenge is to ensure that connected cars meetcustomer expectations in terms of bandwidth and real time computing power. The main determinants of theuser experience are the data rate of the network and the number of users on the channel. Access delay isanother factor that needs to be considered along with the spatial aspects on what coverage a user can expect.

Class Start

EP sent requestto SPG for live Connected car

will receive thevideo andproject

Student mayhave question

Questionforwardedto EPRecived by

faculty toanswer

UCS EP SPG CC

The licensed spectrum used by the wireless system is both scarce and costly, and therefore heavily used.Heavy use means interference from remote systems — base stations, and mobiles as well. That means lessSNIR (Signal to Noise Interference Ratio) and therefore lower data rates — even at short distances. Basestations and base station sites are expensive, so the cell coverage of mobile systems is likely to remain rela-tively large (e.g., 2 or 3 kilometers in diameter). At the edge of these cells, data rates may drop to hundreds of kb/s, if not below. So the challenge is to ensure good link speed even under unfavorable conditions.Another challenge is that existing and new operators should migrate to high speed technology such as LTE,and establish it in all the pockets where they wish to provide connected car-based applications and solu-tions. One of the challenges is to provide ubiquitous LTE connectivity across highways. Typically, in remote areas, LTE connectivity is not viable. So, LTE to 3G hand down or such similar mechanisms of LTE down-grading should be an option. The LTE operator should be able to overlay lower speed connectivity technolo-gy where LTE pockets are not viable due to business considerations. This will ensure that some simple low bandwidth and latency tolerant applications can run, even when LTE connectivity is not available.

3.1 Link Speed

Compared to a disk that delivers applications and large data volumes at little or no delay, accessing a file from a server over wireless links might show noticeable delay. Assume that a doctor has to get patient details from a centralized database at the hospital. It may take less than a second or so, but it is on a file server in a cloud. He might have to download the content, make modifications based on his diagnosis, and upload it back again. This needs to be done in real time, and thus access delay becomes an important factor to be considered. Another related factor is the Quality of Service (QoS) delivered via cloud in LTE-based connected cars. Cloud providers will have to meet the various QoS parameters of each individual subscriber or consum-er, and LTE - as a transport layer - will be crucial to meet this requirement. Due to the high bandwidth and low latency, LTE is well poised to bridge this gap compared to other conventional technologies.

3.2 Access Delays

Gigabit data rates require a huge bandwidth or a huge SNIR. To ensure transmitter power, and that the costis reasonable, and to ensure that multiple users can share the gigahertz bandwidths of the wireless systems,highly directional antennas can be used; but that eliminates mobile use. Hence, this is another area to belooked into.

3.3 Spatial Aspects

One of the major challenges for the automotive industry is to keep pace with the changing technology in theelectronics industry. Obsolescence in the electronic industry is very rapid. But any new car, by virtue of moreprocesses, takes a lot more time to be launched in the market than an electronics product. So, the future connected car has to be modular in a way that it can be easily upgradeable so that it can keep pace with thechanging technology in the electronics industry.

3.4 Modular Design

The whole is always better than the part, which brings us to the next challenge. We need to develop an eco-system where all the participants can come together and pursue “Open Innovation” to deliver end-to-end solutions based on consumer needs. One such example is ngConnect [1]; but a lot more needs to be donedepending on the legalities, pricing policy of the country involved, availability of spectrum and the inter-oper-ability of devices among existing service providers.

3.5 Creating an Ecosystem

Other major issues include security and data integrity. The demand for seamless mobility has never beenmore pronounced. Nearly every business transaction is connected to the Internet in some manner. With theinception of cloud computing, the user’s personal information will be available through the internet. An effec-tive security policy should be set in place to ensure that there is no misuse of the end user’s personal infor-mation.

3.6 Security

4. Summary

Connected cars are fast becoming a reality. The pressure on the automobile industry to bring connected-carsto the market is going to increase. It’s only a matter of time before most companies will launch their productsin the market. It might be a good idea to explore a proof of concept of one of these use cases for connectedcars, keeping in mind the business gain that each scenario could bring. As a next step, we can explore otherscenarios that are applicable to the Indian market, understand the market value that each brings, and thenventure into a proof of concept demonstration for one of these scenarios, in partnership with the necessaryvendors.

5. Reference

[1] http://ngconnect.org/service-concepts/connected-service-vehicle/[2] http://www.inc.com/magazine/20091101/the-connected-car.html[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3GPP_Long_Term_Evolution[4] The Momentum behind LTE Adoption by Darren McQueen IEEE Communications Magazine, Feb 2009.[5] Untethered Clouds by Jan Kruys IEEE wireless Communication, August 2009.

Harikrishna C Warrier

HCL Engineering and R&D Services

Author Info

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