Intelligent pervasive middleware for context-based and localized telematics services

Abstract

Telematics is arguably the next-wave in mobile computing: with most cars already equipped with multiple embedded computing platforms, we shall witness the development of a variety of mobile services and applications with significant commercial potential. Telematics will only become a commercial reality when the underlying architecture is able to address significant concerns related to the security and privacy of telematics data, and is able to provide context information from and to a large number of mobile data sources in a scalable and device-independent manner. A telematics platform should utilize existing Internet components and technologies but cannot rely exclusively on these, especially since mobile commerce applications in the telematics environment impose specific requirements on the relationships between various services and data providers. In this paper we describe how we are developing an open standards telematics platform based on the ts-PWLAN wireless service environment and the Telematics Resource Manager middleware. Our design employs existing web service interfaces coupled with novel technology for connecting to these through a wireless gateway. Our middleware acts as a common substrate for building and deploying a wide range of telematics applications. We describe how several of these applications are currently being built on our infrastructure.