AIRBIQUITY :Powering Vehicles with Over-the-Air Solutions

Leveraging Over-the-Air (OTA) techniques for updating software and firmware has become increasingly popular in several sectors, automotive being one of the foremost. The traditional process of making updates to these vehicles’ software often required them to be dropped at service stations where the vehicle was connected to the systems for updation. This increased the requirement of the cars to be carried to the stations, creating hassles for customers. The solution to this is brought in by receiving OTA software updates that can reduce the dependency on service stations, increase reliability, facilitate timely updates, appropriate response time, and improve overall efficiency. However, realizing the benefits of OTA in the automotive space is not all; it is complex to appropriately execute OTA software updates and data management. One of the primary reasons behind this stands to be increasing usages of Electronic Controlling Units (ECU) today that have replaced several traditional functions of cars like mechanical steering components of the cars. So there is seen a shift in requirements from single ECUs like head units to multiple ECUs, including sensors, gateways and processors. The extensive interconnectivity between multiple ECUs tends to make the systems highly critical and also brings in fair chances of compromised security while updating software Over-the-Air.

Striving to address the complexity of connected vehicles’ OTA, Airbiquity, comes into play, offering its automotive-grade solutions to automakers and suppliers. They are a global leader in connected vehicle services and the pioneer in developing and engineering automotive telematics software technology.

Airbiquity’s comprehensive solutions help clients deploy scalable, reliable and manageable services for connected devices with top-notch multi-ECU OTA solutions that meet the unique automotive needs.

Airbiquity offers its end-to-end platform, called the OTAmatic Software and Data Management, that brings up OTA as a service. This industry-leading solution ensures an automated and secure OTA service delivery capability tailored to automotive requirements. With OTAmatic, customers can leverage an advanced back-end management portal to effectively execute multi-ECU software and data campaigns with superior vehicle and device targeting, distinct policy and privacy controls, and consumer alerts. The solution enables Over-the- Air Orchestration with policy-driven dependency, rollback and recovery. It also offers dynamic data collection and upgradable analytics. One of the predominant features that OTAmatic brings about is end-to-end security with standards-based certification, authentication and encryption. The software utilizes Uptane Security Framework along with security signing management tools and processes to streamline and automate the vehicle software updates and data management from the cloud. It assures authenticity and integrity of the updates that are transmitted and installed in the vehicles. Besides, OTAmatic features vehicle configuration definition and regulatory compliance, campaign creation, approval, reporting and administration and several other functionalities to cater to the dynamic needs of the automotive consumers to ensure efficient management, control, security, and business model requirements of the automotive suppliers or automakers. Further, OTAmatic puts up flexible deployment options, including prominent public clouds or on-premise data centres.

Adding to the interesting OTA offerings, Airbiquity has engaged in The Fusion Project, along with Cloudera, NXP, Teraki, and Wind River, to bring to bear an integrated solution from vehicle edge to cloud, aiming to out beat the challenges associated with siloed machine learning data management lifecycle. This collaboration strives to provide a platform that enables and optimizes future connected and autonomous vehicle systems. The unique hardware, software and cloud platform for data collection, analysis and OTA updates focus on training and improving sophisticated use cases and autonomous driving functions for the production vehicles.

Airbiquity has been deeply engaged with automotive consumers since the very inception of connected vehicle services. Today, Airbiquity technology is powering more than 40,000,000 vehicles and helping consumers meet safety, entertainment and convenience needs. This has enabled them to be extremely reliable for leading automotive companies, suppliers and automakers with end-to-end solutions and tackle the toughest challenges across vehicle connectivity.