HARMAN REMOTE VEHICLE UPDATING SERVICE (OTA)
HARMAN REMOTE VEHICLE UPDATING SERVICE (OTA)
The need to deliver new features and updates throughout the lifespan of a product has become an integral part of connected devices. The connected car is no exception. As the number of ECUs, interconnected via CAN, MOST and other in-vehicle networks increases in connected vehicles, the role and cost of managing in-vehicle software becomes more important due to its size and complexity. Also, as more code is included in vehicles, software-related defects will become increasingly important, both in number and magnitude. This is because of the proliferation of connected car, connected devices, and the progression from ADAS to automated driving. This will cause the attack surface of the vehicle to increase exponentially.
Thus, software management throughout the vehicle lifecycle becomes paramount for automakers. The ability to update automotive software over-the-air (OTA) has become a competitive advantage for OEMs for several reasons. OTA software updates can help by providing the much-desired upgradability and by bridging the gap between the differences in software and hardware lifecycle. These reasons, in addition to the huge financial benefits of mitigating software related vehicle recall expense and utilizing data to optimize automotive operations are the leading reasons for the growth in the Automotive OTA market.
The Software Update Management capabilities of HARMAN helps Automotive OEMs and Suppliers to capitalize on the full business potential of connected cars by enhancing driver experience with rapid deployment of value-added in-car services, minimizing costs through improved efficiency and a reduction in recalls.
HARMAN Remote Vehicle Updating Service is the only OTA service that enables efficient full-vehicle software management. This solution enables OTA updates and management of the entire vehicle, from head unit to the smallest ECUs, and even includes those units with low processing and memory resources. This solution was specifically built to eliminate failures by eliminating any potential risks, such as network problems, cyber security attacks and file tampering, providing OEMs with a secure and efficient way to mitigate risk.
HARMAN’s solution leverages its unique Smart Delta technology which reduces the file update package up to 99 percent. This contributes greatly to network efficiency and cost, as well as minimizing the time it takes for the update to complete resulting in a positive customer experience.
To satisfy ever evolving customer demands and to make a featured packed cockpit affordable to the customer, OEMs need to find ways that can potentially reduce costs and testing/integration efforts while maintaining the software integrity and security. In the computer server industry, similar problems were solved using virtualization techniques.
Powered by Type-1 hypervisor technology, HARMAN’s Device Virtualization capabilities enable multiple operating systems to run on a single hardware platform, securely and with full isolation. HARMAN supports diverse hardware and software platforms, and enables RAM and persistent storage to be portioned and allocated per virtual machine-specific performance requirements. It fully virtualizes all hardware resources including CPU, memory, networking, interface and peripheral devices. The solutions allows sharing of hardware resources across automotive applications such as the rear view camera and the in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system, increases efficiencies, improves security, lowers the BOM and reduces weight.
Vehicles can produce more than 500 GB of data each day. Connected vehicles coupled with data storage and analytics capabilities of the cloud enable numerous new automotive business models. One of the main challenges automotive ecosystem faces in developing a cloud-based Connected Vehicle Platform is Device management. To connect devices to any platform, one must be able to authenticate, authorize, push updates, configure, and monitor software. Also, these services must scale to millions of devices and provide persistent availability.
HARMAN Device Management & Settings capabilities are involved in the remote management, monitoring, analysis and configuration of connected devices. The set of functions and capabilities enables the System Administrator to actively monitor all connected devices while building and maintaining an accurate and valuable real-time database of these devices, their software configuration and their status. HARMAN, as a strong supporter of open standards, uses its protocol engine to ensure flexible implementation options of all its market facing solutions.
Smart Delta technology is used to compare two versions of software, a source version and a target version, mostly in the form of binary executable image files. Identifying only the essential changes, the delta, between the source and target versions, guarantees the smallest and most efficient update file. Smart Delta performs an advanced comparison between any two images identifying changes between content and code location. The technology recognizes the difference between new content and generated content such as changes to reference pointers in the code. It then creates the instruction set defining how to open and install the delta on the target device. It constructs a bit-for-bit identical target version by combining the installed source image and the delta. A by-product of this technology is a full analysis of the changes between the source and the target images.
HARMAN’s advanced virtualization technology is based on Type-1 Virtualization (bare-metal virtualization). The technology includes a hypervisor that virtualizes access to the CPU and memory and backend/front-end drivers that virtualize access to the peripheral hardware devices. The hypervisor serves as the scheduler to run multiple operating systems simultaneously and allocate hardware resources according to the needs of the OS and predefined priorities. It saves Integration time and reuses development by virtualizing the processing unit and memory, as well as virtualizing dedicated peripheral hardware used for networking, I/O and multimedia.
