When SAIC Volkswagen was designing and developing a new generation of smart Internet of Vehicles (IoV) systems, we researched many architectures from popular, new IoV systems both at home and abroad. EMQX messaging middleware, based on the MQTT protocol, provides high concurrency, low latency and high throughput, which makes it very suitable for our IoV use cases. It enables loose coupling of IoV systems and vehicle operating systems, simplifying the interaction between the two. This allows our team to focus on the development of high-level IoV applications. At the same time, EMQX also has good functional scalability and horizontal expansion capabilities for managing capacity. It provides a strong guarantee of support for the coming large-scale demand of new cars and other models.
——Senior Architect of Mobile Internet Business Architecture and Application Development Department of SAIC Volkswagen
Overview
SAIC Volkswagen Co., Ltd. is a joint venture between SAIC Group and Volkswagen Group, one of the oldest automobile joint ventures in China, and is headquartered in Anting, Shanghai. In this transformational new era for the automobile industry, SAIC Volkswagen is focused on innovation-driven development, always taking the market as the guide, constantly improving customer satisfaction, and striving to become the “most valuable and innovative automobile joint venture.".
In 2018, when SAIC Volkswagen was designing and developing its new generation of Internet of Vehicles (IoV) systems, the Connectivity Department studied the requirements for high concurrency, low latency and high throughput messaging. It researched new IoV system architectures at home and abroad and finally adopted the MQTT protocol.
Challenge
Secure access for massive vehicle operations
The new generation of smart IoV systems will provide new services such as vehicle data reporting, point of interest identification, file/message pushing for configuration distribution, operational care notices, and more. These services will generate a massive number of message topics for subscribers and publishers, so SAIC Volkswagen needed a way to support secure, stable MQTT access to the cloud for a massive vehicle data network.
Real-time messaging reliability in a complex network environment
For remote configuration and remote vehicle control use cases in complex networking environments, SAIC Volkswagen needed to meet high requirements for reliability and real-time messaging latency.
Quick business system integration
The development cycle of smart IoV systems is short and the requirements are heavy. SAIC Volkswagen needed to decouple the interactions between telematics service provider (TSP) systems and vehicle systems, and provide a complete, stable, and scalable northward data interface for integration.
Solution
SAIC Volkswagen’s IoV solution is based on EMQ Technologies’ EMQX Enterprise platform, which provides massive connection capacity and high concurrent message throughput. It supports data persistence, southward message caching, secure connections and secure authentication.
Carrier-class distributed cluster architecture
Through EMQX’s multi-node, distributed cluster architecture, SAIC Volkswagen has the capability to connect and transmit data between millions to tens of millions of connected vehicles with secure access based on TLS/DTLS.
Powerful rule engine with one-click data persistence
With EMQX, SAIC Volkswagen also has rich northward data storage capabilities. Through a powerful rule engine, it can move massive amounts of vehicle data into persistent storage and achieves asynchronous data consumption by bridging data into Kafka message queues.
Multiple guarantee mechanisms to ensure real-time, reliable messages
SAIC Volkswagen realizes real-time, safe and reliable message transmission for vehicles in a complex network environment using EMQX’s heartbeat mechanism, last will messages, quality of service (QoS) message control, offline messages and security management.
Universal bus capability integration, decoupling equipment and applications
EMQX serves as a gateway bus for IoV systems, creating a loose coupling between smart IoV systems and car operating systems. This allows the Connectivity team from SAIC Volkswagen to focus on the development of upper-layer applications. Interactions between the IoV system and car operating system only need to call the standard interface capabilities of EMQX.
Achievements
In 2020, SAIC Volkswagen successfully launched its next-generation IoV platform. The total number of vehicles connected to the platform has now reached hundreds of thousands. It is expected to exceed one million by the end of 2021 and continue to grow. The platform has always maintained a stable operating status.
With the help of EMQX, the business needs of SAIC Volkswagen's new IoV and connected car operating system have been met. In the future, SAIC Volkswagen and EMQ will continue to optimize the existing rule engine and encoding and decoding capabilities. They are also considering implementing more business rule filtering and distribution at the middleware messaging layer to provide a more convenient data interface for the development of upper-layer applications . SAIC Volkswagen’s new IoV system will support smart vehicle development into the future and provide SAIC Volkswagen customers with a more intelligent and convenient human-vehicle interactive experience.