NOMADIC DEVICE IDENTIFICATION AND CLIENT PROVISION FOR INTERACTION IN A VEHICULAR NETWORK (2008)

ABSTRACT Interaction between nomadic devices and on-board vehicular systems is highly restricted. Software providers for in-car devices do not care about device identification, thus limiting the set of nomadic devices supported. Although there are different techniques to identify these devices, none of them is individually capable to assure effective identification. This work provides a method to identify nomadic devices with the only requirement of Bluetooth connectivity. The method combines existing techniques to detect the majority of current devices in the market. Success ratio is even increased when additional wireless communication technologies are available. In addition, the proposed method causes minimal user disturbance allowing automatic and seamless device integration. KEYWORDS Nomadic device, on-board vehicular system, device identification, wireless communications, Bluetooth. 1. INTRODUCTION Nowadays, the interaction among mobile devices (or nomadic devices in the context of vehicular environments) ported by the driver of a vehicle or any of the passengers is limited in what regards to seamless integration and collaboration of the nomadic device with the functionality provided in the vehicular network. The main problem is that the nomadic device is restricted to be a specific model of a specific manufacturer and have specific software pre-installed before its usage within the car. Examples of these restrictions can be found for instance in the Sync System, developed by Microsoft and Ford, or some other implementations from car manufacturers such as BMW, Mercedes and Audi. Many international research projects also working on the integration of nomadic devices in the information systems of vehicles also limit the brand and model of the mobile devices needed (see AIDE project [AIDE] or CVIS project [CVIS]). Some previous works have taken into account device diversity but a middleware-based approach has been followed [Bell02]. The main objective of this work is to go beyond this limitation and facilitate the integration of (potentially) any nomadic device with a Bluetooth interface with the in-car services, identifying the device so it can be then provided with adapted software clients for the services offered within the intravehicular network, as in [Mahm06]. The possible combinations of operating systems (including their flavours), virtual machines installed, optional APIs available and its different versions, makes it necessary a mechanism to detect the device and its software stack prior to the provision of the software client. The current paper exposes the design of a system developed to carry out the identification of the nomadic device as seamlessly for the user as possible by means of Bluetooth technology. It focuses on the provision of identification evidences from the nomadic devices to the on-board device. Future works will focus on the rest of the architecture proposed in this paper, and identification evidences will be compared with the information stored in a Device Description Repository (DDR), briefly explained in subsection 2.4. Bluetooth technology has been chosen as communication technology for its extended availability. Besides, some enhancements to