Elsevier

Vehicular Communications

Volume 27, January 2021, 100285
Vehicular Communications

Evolution of IoT-enabled connectivity and applications in automotive industry: A review

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.vehcom.2020.100285Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Comprehensive information on the transformation of smart ICT facility for vehicles.

  • Automotive IoT structure along with evolution of its connectivity and applications.

  • Propose and portray IoT's conceptual frameworks for the automotive industry.

  • Strong reasonings for benefits of IoT technology in vehicles despite challenges.

  • Research opportunities that arise from IoT adoption in automobile applications.

Abstract

Emerging Internet of Things (IoT) is considered as blessings for the automotive industry to offer vast opportunities to inventively create, develop, and enhance seamless services for the comfort of the users. Over time, IoT has significantly expanded and evolved in a numerous variety of automotive applications. Motivated by this growing importance of automotive IoT, this paper presents a critical literature survey on the utilization of IoT technology in the automotive industry, emphasizing the evolution of technology-enabling connectivity and applications. Initially, a review of the transformation and development of IoT-enabled smart systems for the vehicle is presented along with an extensive evaluation of the evolution of technology enabling IoT connectivity and applications. This then follows by the formulation of a comprehensive application scope of IoT technology and a general conceptual framework of IoT applications in the automotive industry. Detailed investigation of the benefits and challenges associated with deploying IoT applications is subsequently discussed together with proper identification of current and future technological challenges in the automotive industry. Furthermore, this study also focuses on assessing various connectivity types embedded in the sensor node functionalities and linked them with associated applications to reveal technical challenges for future automotive IoT advancement. This work is envisaged to shape the future perspectives of IoT technology in the automotive industry and impact the development of IoT platforms devised by the automotive industry-academia community. The promise of this technology will be realized through addressing new research challenges in the vehicular IoT paradigm, and the design of highly-efficient communication technology with minimum cost and efforts.

Introduction

The remarkable advancement in information and communication technology hardware and software has paved the way for promoting innovative, priorly unimaginable connectivity and interaction between humans and their physical surroundings. This phenomenon is well captured by the increasingly popular terminology of Internet of Things (IoT) [1], [2]. IoT represents converging embedded systems and networking infrastructure that interconnect physical objects with a designated end-user system to access, accumulate, process, and transfer data with the assistance of the internet. To accomplish this purpose, IoT encapsulates several vital functionalities, including the sensors and identification elements, software intelligence, and a universal internet connection [3]. IoT was found extensive applications in various sectors, including healthcare [4], smart cities, building [5], energy and smart grid, manufacturing industry, weather forecasting, and environmental monitoring, logistics and resource management, agriculture [6], smart shopping [7], automotive [8] and so forth due to its ubiquity and pervasiveness characteristics. Since the last decade, the market analyses have forecasted 26 billion [9] to 30.73 billion [10] things to be associated with the internet as IoT-enabled devices by the end of 2020, which will increase to a 75.44 billion figures by 2025 [10].

One of the fastest-growing sectors for IoT development is the automotive industry [8], [11], [12]. Market analysts have predicted that there will be around 250 million IoT-enabled vehicles by 2020 [13]. In terms of economic values, a report on Global Automotive IoT Market by Reuters showed a significant projected growth of the IoT Market value from $20.49 billion in the year 2016 to $100.93 billion in the year 2023 [14]. In this context, IoT can play a significant role in enhancing the overall transportation efficiency and comfort in traveling activities through an intelligent transportation system (ITS) to minimize the travel disruption and accidental rate by proper information sharing among the vehicle users and other related authorities [15]. Additionally, IoT can act as an enabler for real-time remote vehicular performance monitoring [16], for instructive vehicular irregularities diagnosis and maintenance [17], and for productivity improvement within smart automotive manufacturing [18]. As a result, the applications of IoT technology proliferate in the automotive industry, exemplified by vehicle condition monitoring, intelligent traffic management, and industrial activity monitoring. For instance, in the case of the industrial processes, a prominent option is extensive adoption of sophisticated connectivity technologies for monitoring and speeding up the manufacturing activities, raw materials, spare parts inventory management, sales management, and after-sales services of automotive products [19].

Intelligent processing and decision-making is a central part within an automotive IoT ecosystem to offer value-added services. This is possible through incorporation of key functional elements, namely the sensing layer, connecting layer, analyzing layer [3], data transferring/aggregating devices [20], and interfacing layer [21]. Herein the sensing element is sensors or similar objects to receive physical information and transfer it to other devices by an electrical signal. This element has a crucial role in collecting data from the designated points [3], [22]. Radiofrequency identification (RFID) and the camera can also serve as a sensing device [21]. Sensing devices are widely used in vehicles to collect information about the engine heat, light, radiator heat, tire pressure, vehicle motion, and so forth [23]. The connecting layer is responsible for establishing the connection between receiving and transferring terminals for carrying collected, and analyzed data from the delivery points to the desired destination points such as internet and cloud-fog computing [24]. This layer consists of relevant connectivity technologies suitable for the automotive ecosystem. Analyzing tool is used to analyze useful information and patterns from the collected data supplied by the sensor as per given pre-defined instructions and computational models [3], [21]. Data transferring/aggregating devices are responsible for data aggregation, and transmission by establishing interconnections among sensors, end-user terminals like displays, remote routers [20]. The interface layer is employed to show relevant outputs after data transfer and analysis. Many appliances to support its functionality covers mobile displays, personal computers, printers, and so forth [21], [24].

This review paper is motivated by the exciting recent progress of IoT adoption and its future research advancement, including real-time vehicles vulnerable parts/operations observation, real-time environmental pollution observation, sophisticated energy-efficient vehicular communication networks, and smooth industrial operations in the automotive industry with minimum expenses. This paper specifically proposes a comprehensive review of the IoT technology in the automotive industry with full emphasis on enabling techniques for IoT connectivity and high-layer applications. In particular, this paper covers the following:

  • 1.

    Providing fundamental information about automotive IoT technology;

  • 2.

    A critical review of the transformation and development of IoT-enabled smart systems in the automotive sector;

  • 3.

    Extensive examination on the evolution of technology enabling IoT connectivity and applications for vehicular structural health observation, industrial management and traffic management;

  • 4.

    Formulating a comprehensive application scope of IoT technology and a general conceptual framework of IoT applications in the automotive sector;

  • 5.

    Detailed investigation on the benefits and challenges associated with deploying IoT applications in the automotive industry;

  • 6.

    Expanding the areas of future research on IoT technology as driven by proper identification of current and projected future technological challenges in the automotive industry.

Moreover, this paper differentiates from various recent review works as it emphasizes on the evolution of automotive IoT applications with the corresponding available communication technologies. This is done by gathering the required information from the latest research works, and conceptualizing directions for future research work. For instances, earlier review works on IoT for the automotive industry were concentrated on specific issues such as review study on the intra-vehicular network [25], the survey on crucial technologies and concise description of limited automotive IoT applications [26] and review on car parking systems [27]. This paper takes a step forward by comprehensively gathering a wide range of automotive IoT applications and combining them with other experimental articles i.e., accidental position detection [28], important vehicle tracking [29], vehicle burglary prevention [30], smart city traffic management [31], vehicles performance observation [32], automotive industrial management [33], and so forth. This work is anticipated to capture emerging and diversifying applications of IoT in the automotive sector to serve as a foundation to advance the recent adoption of IoT in the automotive industry, moving towards Industry 4.0.

The remaining sections of this paper are organized as follows. Section 2 is devoted to highlight evolving IoT technology in the automotive industry, available connectivity techniques for implementing IoT technology in automotive products, and current vehicular IoT applications. Section 3 presents elaborated discussion on vehicular IoT applications in industrial cases of automotive vehicles. Section 4 discusses the general conceptual framework of automotive IoT applications underpinning real-time vehicular monitoring, automotive industrial and commercial observation, and transportation management. Section 5 describes the importance and challenges of deploying IoT technology in the automotive sector encompassing both products and processes. Section 6 outlines open research issues and possible future research directions of IoT in the automotive industry. Finally, Section 7 concludes this review work by highlighting key contributions and remarks.

Section snippets

Evolution of IoT technology for automotive applications

Since the mid of the 1960s up until now, there have been tremendous efforts of advancing and developing smartness and intelligence in vehicles and cars, including connected IoT technology, to enrich two-way interactions between humans and automotive vehicles. This evolving progress is manifested in the context of Research and Development Era (1966 to 1995) and a later advancement achieved by New Mobility Era (anticipated starting in 2020). This transformation has been bridged via Embedded Era

Emerging applications of IoT in automotive industries

With IoT technology being used for various purposes, both in-vehicle and a wider automotive industrial sectors, it is imperative to state IoT as an emerging technology paradigm. Nowadays, it captivates industrial attention and its application in the automobile industry for a wide communication range, i.e., P2P (Peer to Peer), P2M (Peer to Machine) and M2M (machine to machine) is desirable along with improvement opportunities through performance, productivity, dependability, safety, and privacy.

Conceptual framework of IoT application in automotive sector

The present and future applications of IoT in the automotive sector can be classified into three sections, such as real-time vehicular monitoring purpose, real-time industrial and commercial observation purpose, and real-time transportation management purpose. The conceptual idea depicted to bring automotive-related all activity under real-time monitoring by using IoT technology. It will help to minimize operational and maintenance cost, reduce time consumption, improve productivity, ensure

Benefits of IoV, limitations and Its challenges

IoT applications in the automotive sector have revolved for various reasons. Although IoT technology has a significant impact on transforming the automotive sector, it comes with shortcomings. We provide elaboration on the benefits, shortcomings, and challenges to deploy the IoT technology in the automotive sector.

Issues, potential solutions and future research

After carefully evaluating the evolution of IoT technology in the automotive industry, we have identified several issues related to research opportunities that can shape directions for future research. The detailed description of issues and potential solutions for the different concerns will be presented in the following sub-sections.

Conclusion

The ultimate purpose of deploying IoT technology in the automotive sector is to administer a higher level of vehicle comfort by using state-of-the-art vehicular communications and improve travel experience with minimum travel disruptions and unexpected incidents through intelligent computerized processing. This paper has comprehensively provided a review on clear evolving roles and applications of IoT in the automotive industry, converging diverse communication technologies to support the

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank University Malaysia Pahang for providing the laboratory facilities and financial support under the University FLAGSHIP Research Grants (Project number RDU192203), International Matching Grant (No. RDU192704), and Postgraduate Research Scheme Grant (No. PGRS200325).

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