Mobile communications could revolutionise traffic management

Rudolf Mietzner looks at how machine-to-machine technologies and applications will affect the automotive sector in the coming years

The worldwide mobile and fixed-line Machine-to-Machine (M2M) market will be worth some €220 billion this year. Mobile embedded applications will account for some e19 billion of that. Perhaps more than anything else, the figures underscore the fact that although Car-to-Car/Vehicle-to-Vehicle (C2C/V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) deployments are yet to commence worldwide in a large-scale sense, the underlying concepts and technologies are anything but new.

"Whether one considers it from a machine-to-machine or mobile device-to-mobile device perspective, there's already a business there," says 673 Cirquent's Rudolf Mietzner, formerly the General Manager of the Car 2 Car Communication Consortium and Secretary-General of Europe's COMeSafety project. "In Europe alone, Deutsche Telekom already has an M2M business worth around €1.2 billion.

"In truth M2M can probably be traced back over 25-30 years, however the original applications were over fixed communication lines. Deutsche Telecom set up a subsidiary back in the 1990s which specialised in fixed-line solutions for security and so on.

"It is the move to mobile communications which is going to revolutionise this space, and over the next five to six years we're going to see a lot of remote-control alarm functions migrate to mobile platforms."

One major market will be the utilities sector, where smart metering is about to become much more common as the 1690 European Commission (EC) regulates for privatisation and monthly billing.

"Some countries, such as the UK, are already pushing on with this and the big utility companies are looking to read meters remotely. In practice, that means the installation of new meters which can communicate via a Wireless Local Area Network [WLAN] or the 2059 ZigBee standard, mobile receiver and SIM," Mietzner continues. "But this explosion in M2M also affects other sectors, including the automotive.

"1731 BMW, for example, is looking to establish an in-vehicle communications platform for tele-diagnostic purposes. It wants to be able to connect to a vehicle and see alarms generated when faults occur. This will mean a highly automated environment where tele-fixing could be triggered for minor faults or an alert passed to the owner or driver once stationary telling him or her that something needs to be done. We'll see such applications start to emerge in the next four to five years."

An aspect of wireless-based M2M is its ability to affect many different vertical markets. Mietzner points to the increasing automation of, for example, eCall services.

"For eCall, we could see premium, subscription-based services whereby a user's health data is held in a secure place but arrives with the patient at a hospital or other health facility when an accident or injury occurs. Greater automation makes a lot of sense in such scenarios and prototyping has already been carried out. We'll see this start to appear over the next five to 10 years.

"The European OEMs are very keen to harmonise services in a cross-border sense and identify new verticals to step into. On smart phones, you'll see lots of new applications, such as the ability to remotely access a vehicle to check whether a door is locked or the fuel tank is full. All such things are M2M-related."

Technological evolution

Current 3G (SMS/GPRS)-based communications technology works very well for many of the applications being discussed here however Long-Term Evolution (LTE) 4G networks are already being rolled out.

"These are designed to support the coming generation of smart phones, providing downstream data rates from 100Ms/s and upstream data rates from 50Mb/s over air. That will allow some very heavy applications to be fielded," Mietzner continues. "Data services' capabilities will increase by the hundreds and thousands of percents over the next few years and flat rates of billing per-gigabyte will force yet more new services to emerge. Companies such as 2453 Renault, PSA and BMW are already looking for Europe-wide package services to offer to their customers. We'll probably see EC regulations which echo this trend emerge over the next three to five years."

Supply and demand

As well as offering big opportunities for hardware manufacturers, M2M will also open the gateways for stakeholders on both sides of the supply and demand divide. Mietzner goes back to the utilities companies to illustrate this: "In Germany, for example, the utilities companies still employ very old-fashioned billing methods. It's still common to pay a €25-30 up-front access charge and then be billed annually for consumption. Going forward, that will change and companies will have to charge for what's consumed far more regularly.

"But that means that companies can actually reduce their costs, redesigning their software to become more real time-based and competitive. They will be able to scale the service offerings to meet different users' needs.

"Another example in the manufacturing sector might be the suppliers of CNC machines. These companies sell very sophisticated machines to their customers but many of these machines continue to work in isolated environments. Changes to their programming still require human intervention.

"It's perfectly possible to connect 10 or 15 of these machines together over the air. That makes it far cheaper to service both products and software in this area. It becomes possible to scale output in real time and undertake predictive maintenance based on actual use rather than pre-determined maintenance intervals.

"On the supply side, we're already seeing scalable platforms emerge. Telenor in Norway is offering specialised M2M services and selling SIMs specifically for this.

"On the OEM side, there is the potential to combine services that will have a very positive effect on such things as logistics. If a vehicle breaks down, there is the ability to know immediately that something has gone wrong. If something is about to go wrong on a vehicle, the driver can not only be notified but also directed to the nearest location where a specific part might be in stock. And if that vehicle's going to be late, on-demand production by those CNC machine mentioned earlier can also be scaled. It's all about maintaining flow."

The automotive sector

It is difficult to gauge what proportion of the M2M market might eventually be made up by C2C, or what that C2C proportion might eventually be worth in monetary terms; Mietzner says that there is a certain amount of reluctance on the part of the OEMs to give a direct answer when questioned.

"My personal view is that 'pure' C2C is an autonomous, WLAN-based technology for direct, real-time exchange of critical information. There isn't a GPRS or LTE-based network in the background.

 "As to whether C2C will be a big player in the overall M2M market: that depends on whether the market sees 'C2C' as also including mobile communications.

"But one way or another, cars will have M2M connectivity in the future. Multimodal in-vehicle platforms will take care of differentiation between M2M-type messages passed from the local environment, such as warnings from infrastructure-based sensors of accidents or incidents some miles away, and C2C exchanges in the more immediate environment.

"It isn't though particularly easy to predict exactly what the future products and applications might be. I think we'll see a situation which we already recognise with the iPhone and other smart phones - that once the technology is ready, the applications, including increasingly sophisticated traffic guidance systems based on two-way exchanges between vehicles and their surrounding infrastructure, will come."