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HOT TOPIC: SMART CONNECTIVITY

Intelligent Connectivity: The Real Information Superhighway

Xingang Guo
Principal Engineer
Intel Integrated Platform Research Lab

I lead the Connected Vehicle research team at Intel Labs. At the recent Research @ Intel Day we demonstrated one scenario that shows the kind of value that intelligent connectivity can bring to the car.

You buy a new car. You park it at the airport and take your family on vacation. Two days later, someone hits your car in the airport parking lot. When you return from vacation your car is a wreck.

What if we make it possible for the car to talk to the cloud and also to your mobile phone? You can get a message from the car telling you about the collision. Not only that, the car can send you a video-capture showing its immediate environment for before and after the event. By knowing the severity of the incident, and its immediate context, you know whether to call the authorities.

Intelligent connected solutions tend to be very domain-specific. For this reason we find it extremely important to begin our research by asking the right questions.

User experience is key

We sit down with automakers to ask them how technology can help them better service their customers. And we work closely with Intel’s User Experience team to gain a clear understanding of how such a value proposition will be perceived by consumers. Only then do we begin to develop the architecture to provide a solution.

And once the technology is developed, we give careful consideration to how the technology is packaged so that it can be conveniently used by non-technical consumers.

As you can see from my description of our Research @ Intel Day demo, ease of software installation and authentication are very important issues for the automakers, their suppliers and for consumers alike.

There are several systems available today that enable you to remotely start your car, or activate the climate control system using your smart phone. You obviously want this process to be secure, so that someone else cannot have access to your vehicle.

To address this issue, many present-day systems require you to go to your PC to set up a user account and acquire login information, which you then must put into your phone to enable it to talk to your car.

When we talked with everyday consumers, they told us they wanted this capability on their phones, but in many cases there was no way for them to activate the system simply by using the phone inside the car. In our actual experience, we found that as you go through a busy day at home or in the office, you often don’t have time to set up the account.

Simpler authentication

So one of our design goals was to make the authentication and device activation solution usable by an everyday consumer from inside the car, an environment without keyboard access.

This required us to redesign the authentication protocol using video and graphics recognition software or a wireless near-field communications (NFC) wireless link to enable device introduction, authentication and the download of the car control app with one touch. It’s all made possible by taking a picture of a barcode on the car’s display screen using your phone.

The fact that you must use your car key to start up the car, and that your phone must be held inches away from the car’s console for NFC to work, adds robust authentication, while making it easy and simple to get the system up and running.

Like any security solution, we developed this one only after taking the time to thoroughly understand the threat model and the degree of security we need to provide within the boundaries of a practical real-world usage model.

In this case we target the level of security for practical usage. By communicating with the cloud and using multiple authentication keys for each individual car, we can help to prevent someone who happens to have the same kind of automobile, the same kind of smart phone and the same app from gaining control over your car. The data conversation can only occur between your car and your phone. This is the first level of trust.

Then the car needs to provide the phone with a secret code it can use to download the control app. Within this scenario, the car talks to the phone, which in turn talks to the cloud, so if you should lose your phone, your service provider can quickly disable it.

Introducing always-on IP connectivity opens up limitless opportunities for new services. For example, your car can let your family member survey the vicinity of the car in a parking lot at night to help ensure that it is safe to approach.

Smart services for the car

Automakers see connectivity as a way to add value to their business, and this goes far beyond providing drivers and passengers with access to their personal information, and multimedia content. Once I equip an in vehicle infotainment system with a powerful computing platform, a graphics engine and always-on connectivity, I can generate all kinds of data-driven services.

I can get crowd-source data collected from thousands of other cars on the road to provide traffic information, road condition updates, accident reports and routing suggestions in near real-time. Service providers use data on driving patterns to determine insurance rates, or to deliver products aimed at your particular driving requirements.

Using M2M technology brings intelligence to the car, enabling it to be cognizant of its environment, adaptable to changes in the physical world around it and capable of optimizing its performance in response to those changes.

We envision for example, cars that can adapt their performance to the specific needs of an individual driver, or use human-like intelligence in the form of policies, heuristics, rules and suggestions to grant priority to critical communications.

Our fundamental role at Intel Labs is to research and develop technologies that can provide new experiences and capabilities to consumers. Another part of the effort is to create an infrastructure that includes the computing, I/O, connectivity and software APIs that developers and service providers can use to create their application-specific logic.

At Intel Labs we are helping the automotive and technology industries get onto the fast lane of the information superhighway.