A novel IoT platform for the era of connected cars

The race among manufacturers to build convenient, safe, and autonomous Connected Cars by applying the latest digital technologies, and ultimately a completely self-driving vehicle, is already underway. One of the cornerstones of such vehicles is the continuous ingestion of massive amounts of data from a wide variety of hardware components, including sensors, onboard cameras, and further external sources. Cloud computing and big data processing are ideal candidates and already proven technologies to store and process the heterogeneous, rapidly growing, and large-scale data sets. The cloud may act as a kind of central hub or as an Internet of Things (IoT) back-end where the sensor and the other available data can be gathered while also offering an elastic platform where the vast amount of data can be processed, analyzed and distributed real-time. In our paper we detail the evolution of a cloud-based, scalable IoT back-end framework and services built on top for handling and processing vehicular data in various use case scenarios: CAN data collection, remote device flashing, Eco-driving, weather report and forecast. The first version is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution with a reference implementation deployed on an OpenNebula based cloud. The second iteration runs on a private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud built on the Cloud Foundry platform within the premises of an automotive supplier company. Both variants have been successfully evaluated and validated with benchmarks.