ProCMotive: Bringing Programability and Connectivity into Isolated Vehicles

In recent years, numerous vehicular technologies, e.g., cruise control and steering assistant, have been proposed and deployed to improve the driving experience, passenger safety, and vehicle performance. Despite the existence of several novel vehicular applications in the literature, there still exists a signi€cant gap between resources needed for a variety of vehicular (in particular, data-dominant, latency-sensitive, and computationally-heavy) applications and the capabilities of already-inmarket vehicles. To address this gap, di‚erent smartphone-/Cloud-based approaches have been proposed that utilize the external computational/storage resources to enable new applications. However, their acceptance and application domain are still very limited due to programability, wireless connectivity, and performance limitations, along with several security/privacy concerns. In this paper, we present a novel reference architecture that can potentially enable rapid development of various vehicular applications while addressing shortcomings of smartphone-/Cloud-based approaches. Še architecture is formed around a core component, called SmartCore, a privacy/security-friendly programmable dongle that brings general-purpose computational and storage resources to the vehicle and hosts in-vehicle applications. Based on the proposed architecture, we develop an application development framework for vehicles, that we call ProCMotive. ProCMotive enables developers to build customized vehicular applications along the Cloud-to-edge continuum, i.e., di‚erent functions of an application can be distributed across SmartCore, the user’s personal devices, and the Cloud. In order to highlight potential bene€ts that the framework provides, we design and develop two di‚erent vehicular applications based on ProCMotive, namely, Amber Response and Insurance Monitor. We evaluate these applications using real-world data and compare them with state-of-the-art technologies.