Industry IoT Consortium Launches Automotive Over-the-Air Updates Testbed

By Tiera Oliver

Associate Editor

Embedded Computing Design

September 17, 2021

News

Industry IoT Consortium Launches Automotive Over-the-Air Updates Testbed

The Industry IoT Consortium (IIC) announced the IIC Automotive Over-The-Air (OTA) Updates Testbed to show manufacturers how to deploy, update, and replace software on a fleet of vehicles or devices remotely.

The testbed announced by the IIC is designed to allow users to make updates from almost anywhere, limiting updates to what is required and authorized, and ensures the safety and security of passengers by focusing on system trustworthiness: security, safety, integrity, privacy, and resilience.

With the Go,Kart!, a replica of a fully functional connected vehicle, as the base platform, the testbed integrates access technologies, security, and applications and services to deliver software updates. IIC based the Automotive OTA Updates Testbed on the Open Service Gateway Initiative (OSGi), a Java framework for developing and deploying modular software programs and libraries, as the on-board gateway between a vehicle and the cloud. The testbed employs commercially available connectivity technologies such as 5G, Wi-Fi, and Li-Fi.

"The testbed introduced Li-Fi as a complementary wireless communication option for OTA updates and general V2X communication to address RF challenges such as signal interference, jamming, and limited capacity," said Dirar Hakeem, Co-Founder, AASA and one of the testbed leads. "The combination of wireless technologies ensures stable OTA updates, vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication, and efficient operations."

The testbed enables manufacturers to manage the entire DevOps cycle of an automobile, from development to testing to deployment to operations, mitigating cybersecurity risks inherent in the integration of IT and OT. 

For information about the Automotive OTA Updates Testbed and a list of IIC members who contributed to it, click here.

For more information, visit www.iiconsortium.org.

Tiera Oliver, Associate Editor for Embedded Computing Design, is responsible for web content edits, product news, and constructing stories. She also assists with newsletter updates as well as contributing and editing content for ECD podcasts and the ECD YouTube channel. Before working at ECD, Tiera graduated from Northern Arizona University where she received her B.S. in journalism and political science and worked as a news reporter for the university’s student led newspaper, The Lumberjack.

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