At present, China’s Internet of vehicles industry is in the period of deep integration with 5G technology. With the development and maturity of 5G and V2X technology, the future Internet of vehicles industry will open up new growth space.
The Internet of vehicles is a typical application of The Internet of Things technology in the field of transportation system. The integration layout and collaborative development of relevant technical fields involved in the Internet of vehicles industry are connected to the Internet of Things to some extent. As an open source Internet of Things data infrastructure software provider, EMQ has provided many customers in the field of Internet of Vehicles with cloud-side collaborative Internet of Things infrastructure software over the years to realize the unified connection of people, vehicles, roads and clouds. For vehicle manufacturers, T1 suppliers, aftermarket service providers, travel service companies to create intelligent network, autonomous driving and V2X scenario solutions.
In this series of articles, we will share with you how to build a reliable, efficient and industry-specific Internet of vehicles platform based on EMQ’s practical experience in the field of Internet of vehicles, from theoretical knowledge such as protocol selection to practical operation such as platform architecture design.
preface
MQTT protocol has long been the mainstream protocol in the field of Internet of Things, and it has been widely used in the construction of Internet of Things platforms in many industries by virtue of its characteristics of lightweight, efficient, reliable and secure, two-way communication and so on. Then how about the application of MQTT protocol in the Internet of vehicles scenario?
This article will from EMQ car networking industry users experience of actual case, the contrast different Internet communication protocol in the networking platform structures, the advantage and disadvantage of the application, the sharing enterprise how to based on their own situation to choose the appropriate MQTT messages access products and services, and the current in the data transmission security, the most popular technology in aspects of data integration solutions.
Is MQTT protocol suitable for the Internet of Vehicles?
The whole business architecture of the Internet of vehicles is complex and involves multiple communication links. In this paper, we discuss the cloud-side message access module mainly responsible for the Internet of vehicles platform.
MQTT is an Internet of Things communication protocol based on publish/subscribe mode. It is simple and easy to implement, supports QoS, and has small message size, and occupies half of the Internet of Things protocols. In the scenario of Internet of vehicles, MQTT is still capable of flexible, fast and safe access of massive vehicle-vehicle system, and guarantees real-time and reliability of messages in complex network environment. Its main application advantages are as follows:
- Open message protocol, easy to implement. There are a large number of mature software libraries and hardware modules on the market, which can effectively reduce the difficulty of vehicle and machine access and use cost;
- Provide flexible release and subscription and theme design, be able to communicate messages through a large number of topics, and deal with all kinds of Internet of vehicles business;
- The Payload has a flexible format and compact packet structure. It can flexibly carry various types of service data and effectively reduce vehicle-to-vehicle network traffic.
- Three optional QoS levels are provided, which can adapt to different network environments of vehicle-vehicle equipment.
- Provides online status awareness and session persistence capabilities to facilitate online status management and offline message retention.
To sum up, MQTT protocol will undoubtedly bring convenience to the establishment of Internet of vehicles platform if it is equipped with messaging middleware products with massive vehicle-end connection, soft real-time, high concurrent data throughput and multiple security guarantee capabilities.
How does MQTT compare to other protocols?
So far, MQTT protocol is the first choice of most Internet of vehicles customers. We have also met some customers who have chosen other protocols such as private TCP and HTTP, but in the end, MQTT is the best choice in the Internet of vehicles scenario.
Before the contact with MQTT protocol, a large oEMS in South China adopted the privatized TCP protocol (ACP protocol) to build the Internet of vehicles service platform. After a long period of protocol specification design and development, the main functions of the Internet of vehicles platform have been basically realized. However, with the increasing business scenarios of the Internet of vehicles and the increasing number of vehicles and machines, the disadvantages of privatized TCP gradually become prominent: Privatized protocol definition and version maintenance are difficult. All protocol functions (such as keep-live, disconnection, offline message, etc.) need customized development. Privatized protocol also requires customized development for terminal hardware adaptation, resulting in high cost, long cycle, and slow update iteration. With the continuous improvement of MQTT protocol ecology and its wide adoption in the selection of communication protocol for the Internet of vehicles platform, the OEMS began to adopt MQTT protocol in the development of the new generation of Internet of vehicles platform. The complete MQTT protocol support provided by the EMQX Internet of Things access platform not only reduced the development cost and shortened the development cycle, At the same time, more functional scenarios and operation and maintenance means are realized.
A large oEMS in East China now has more than one million vehicles and machines in stock. The previous Internet of vehicles platform is constructed by private TCP protocol. Facing the massive message communication of millions of vehicles and machines, the privatized TCP protocol has high maintenance cost, insecure message reliability, and heavy workload of daily system maintenance and function expansion and development. As MQTT protocol is widely adopted in the group’s internal vehicle network platform, the OEM also starts the transformation and upgrading of MQTT protocol. At present, some models have been upgraded through OTA upgrade, and they plan to complete the upgrading and upgrading of all models gradually in the future.
Another customer from an automobile company contacted us in the early stage. However, considering the simple business at the initial stage and the problem of technical selection, we finally used the self-built HTTP service to access the automobile. With the development of services, the traditional request-response mode communication can no longer meet the needs of new services. At the same time, as the number of functions and terminals increases, the communication volume of the entire platform increases exponentially, and the performance bottleneck of using HTTP access appears. The customer finally chose MQTT as the access protocol, using the data access solution provided by EMQX to solve the previous business problems.
In general, private protocol has the characteristics of closure and exclusivity. It is designed to solve specific problems in the early stage of development, resulting in a lack of flexibility. It is often difficult to meet new requirements after business adjustment, and enterprises have to add more features into the protocol. Or because of the increase of access, the private protocol Server reaches the bottleneck of performance and scalability too early. The above reasons eventually lead to the shift of users’ focus from business development to the development of access layer and middleware, which virtually increases the cost of platform projects. Therefore, MQTT protocol naturally becomes the most suitable mainstream protocol in the field of Internet of vehicles.
How do I select an MQTT messaging access product/service?
In platform design, system architecture design and product selection is a rigorous process. Users should first evaluate whether the product functions meet the business requirements, whether the performance and scalability can support the short-term design capacity of the platform and the possible future growth based on the application scenarios. The cost of using the product is also an important consideration. The cost of the product itself, IaaS infrastructure, development integration, and maintenance work all affect the customer’s total cost of ownership. In addition, the evaluation should be based on the product’s globalization capability. For projects with overseas business, whether the product can support global deployment, whether it can meet the compliance of each region, and whether it can avoid the lock-in of cloud computing providers are the basis for selecting the product.
EMQ’s IOT customers are often compared in the selection process with cloud computing providers’ iot messaging access SaaS services. EMQX’s strengths, by contrast, lie in private deployment and standardization capabilities — private deployment to any cloud platform, no platform lock-in, and standard MQTT protocols, which are highly valued by iot customers.
Avoiding cloud vendor lock-in can help enterprise users gain a bidding advantage and reduce the impact of an enterprise ending its relationship with a cloud vendor. On the other hand, multi-cloud support can also make full use of the technology and business advantages of different cloud computing providers. For example, some enterprises with global operations can choose different cloud computing providers at home and abroad.
In addition, a significant number of customers appreciate the lower usage cost of EMQX. The fundamental reason is that the larger the business scale, the higher the access service cost of the cloud computing provider.
But there are cost exceptions. In the past, some car enterprise users evaluated the access services and EMQX provided by cloud providers, and finally gave up private deployment and chose access services provided by cloud providers after considering their own operation and maintenance costs and risks. This problem has been resolved with the launch of EMQ’s fully managed MQTT messaging service, EMQX Cloud. Through EMQX Cloud, users can not only avoid the burden of infrastructure management and maintenance, but also maintain the advantages of clear and controllable cost budget consistent with private deployment, cross-cloud and cross-platform, so as to carry out the construction of Internet of vehicles platform without worries.
EMQX also has its own advantages for customers with proprietary deployment requirements. EMQX provides global commercial support, high product performance enables massive connections and throughput, and rules engines and data Bridges provide fast integration capabilities. The high reliability and scalability of the architecture for the Internet of vehicles, as well as the cloud-side INTEGRATION of V2X information exchange capabilities, also make EMQX stand out from its peers that support private deployment.
In 2018, when SAIC Volkswagen designed and developed a new generation of Internet of vehicles (IOT) system, the SC department took into account the scene requirements of large concurrency, low latency and high throughput of the new iot, referred to the mainstream new iot system architecture at home and abroad, and finally adopted the MQTT protocol to build a new generation of Internet of vehicles platform.
In this project, the characteristics of MQTT and EMQX’s powerful rule engine data integration capability and universal bus capability effectively meet customers’ requirements for real-time reliability of messages under complex networks, and solve the project’s time constraints and heavy tasks, requiring rapid development and docking.
Saic Volkswagen joins EMQ to build a new generation of intelligent vehicle network system
What technical solutions are people using?
As message middleware, EMQX provides rich and flexible integration capabilities, and each function provides different technical solutions for users to choose. After long-term use, the most popular technical solutions are as follows:
security
At the transport link layer, we recommend users to enable TLS for encrypted transmission. However, the load balancing products of most cloud computing providers do not support TLS termination, and additional components such as HAProxy need to be deployed to uninstall THE TLS certificate during production deployment. In addition, some customers need TLS encryption for transmission, and we also provide customized solutions.
TBox access most commonly uses certificate authentication, EMQX provides an extensible authentication chain, supports third-party authentication platform extensions (such as PKI systems), and user name/password-based external data sources and internal database authentication follow.
In addition, EMQX authentication is enabled for most users, and corresponding publishing and subscription permissions are assigned to different TBox terminals to effectively protect data security.
Data integration
The ability to connect the massive amount of Internet of vehicles data flowing through EMQX to business systems is the most valued by customers. EMQX has a built-in rules engine and data bridge capability, which can stream MQTT data to Kafka, various SQL/NoSQL/timing databases. The vast majority of customers in real projects use Kafka as a back-end stream processing component.
Kafka focuses on data storage and reading, while EMQX focuses on communication between clients and servers. EMQX is used to quickly receive and process messages from a large number of iot devices. Kafka can collect and store this data and send it to back-end programs for analysis and processing. This architecture is currently the most widely used data integration solution.
Write in the last
At present, the rapid development of automotive electronics boosts the technological upgrading of the Internet of vehicles industry, and the future market prospect of intelligent transportation and automobile industry is considerable. It can be predicted that more car owners and consumers and bicycle manufacturers will benefit from it. Based on the comprehensive MQTT protocol and EMQX’s strong product capabilities, developers of Internet of vehicles platforms can quickly build robust and flexible Internet of vehicles platforms. EMQ will also keep up with industry trends, promote the development and implementation of technologies related to messaging and edge computing, and provide faster, better and more intelligent messaging service infrastructure for users of autonomous driving, vehicle collaboration and Internet of vehicles.
Copyright: EMQ
Original link: www.emqx.com/zh/blog/mqt…