Integrating connected vehicles in Internet of Things ecosystems: Challenges and solutions

Vehicles are becoming the next frontiers for Internet of Things (IoT) based platforms and services. Connected vehicles, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) together with IoT technologies have the potential of unleashing efficient and more sustainable transportation system which is fast becoming an important societal challenge. This paper formulates several main research and engineering challenges for integrating connected vehicles into IoT ecosystems. The challenges include - (i) a suitable alternative of cloud platform to support real time connected vehicular scenarios, (ii) uniform description and data collection mechanisms from vehicular sensors, (iii) integrating smart devices into transport systems, (iv) uniform mechanism for data fusion and analytics and (v) integrating all heterogeneous elements into a standard IoT architecture for connected vehicles. To mitigate these challenges, we propose a novel IoT framework. The solutions, operational phases of the framework, software elements & their implementations and advantages are described in details. The building blocks of the framework are integrated into an oneM2M standard architecture. Finally, the paper concludes with best practice recommendations and lessons learnt from the prototyping.