The Internet of Things (IoT) can be defined as the network of physical objects, or “things,” embedded with sensors and software for processing and exchanging data with other devices and ecosystems using the Internet as a medium. With its rapid growth over the past decade, it has permeated several application domains, including intelligent vehicular systems. The Internet of Autonomous Vehicles (IoAV) is a subset of IoT that envisions dynamic autonomous driving without human intervention. The dynamic nature of the environment in which autonomous vehicles operate introduces significant challenges, such as real-time communication and security vulnerabilities. These challenges cannot be directly addressed by standard cybersecurity solutions designed primarily for static IoT environments. In this work, we outline the various vulnerabilities of the IoAV systems, and we delve into the critical importance of adopting lightweight security protocols. These protocols are crucial to ensure robust protection while at the same time not jeopardizing the performance of the IoAV system. We also highlight the fast lightweight security protocols implemented on heterogeneous embedded, low-power, high-performance computing platforms as a viable solution to address these challenges. © The authors.

Autonomous vehicles need accurate and dependable positioning, and these systems need to be tested extensively. We have evaluated positioning based on ultrawideband (UWB) ranging with our self-driving model car using a highly automated approach. Random drivable trajectories were generated, while the UWB position was compared against the Real-Time Kinematic Satellite Navigation (RTK-SN) positioning system which our model car also is equipped with. Fault injection was used to study the fault tolerance of the UWB positioning system. Addressed challenges are automatically generating test cases for real-time hardware, restoring the state between tests, and maintaining safety by preventing collisions. We were able to automatically generate and carry out hundreds of experiments on the model car in real time and rerun them consistently with and without fault injection enabled. Thereby, we demonstrate one novel approach to perform automated testing on complex real-time hardware. Copyright © 2020 Benjamin Vedder et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is one of the most important technologies that feed the growing field of Internet of Things and Wireless Sensor Networks. Due to its flexibility and unique low power-consumption, an increasing number of industrial devices, household appliances and wearables are being designed using it. However, the real-time demands of these networks such as timing and Quality of Service are not fully covered by the protocol itself. To help improve and offer some control over these characteristics, this paper presents a time slot transmission scheme with packet prioritization. It is based on the division and allocation of the connection interval to two types of messages: real-time and ordinary. The goal is to offer the lowest packet loss and time guarantees for real-time messages, while providing acceptable throughput for ordinary ones. Since the probability of a BLE connection to close increases with the number of packets sent through it, the position where a real-time packet is being sent as well as the number of ordinary messages in a connection represent key factors. The use of the first and last slot for real-time packets with ordinary flow restricted to the space between them decreases the transmission delay uncertainty and allows probability tuning based on the number of ordinary messages. Simulations were performed using the proposed scheme and a reduction of more than 100 times in the delay variance was observed for real-time transmissions. Regarding reliability, around 5% of the packets were lost for a bit error rate of 10⁻³. © 2020, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

Relaying can increase reliability, range, or throughput. In many cyber-physical systems (CPS), relaying is used to maximize reliability before a given deadline. Since concurrent transmissions are not supported by most CPS, time-division multiple access (TDMA) is typically used. However, a major drawback of relaying in TDMA is that pre-allocated time-slots are wasted if their respective transmitters do not have any correctly received packet to relay. Therefore, in this letter, we propose a novel relay grouping scheme to overcome this drawback. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme significantly enhances the reliability while guaranteeing the deadline for each message. © Copyright 2019 IEEE - All rights reserved.

Accurate positioning is a requirement for many applications, including safety-critical autonomous vehicles. To reduce cost and at the same time improving accuracy for positioning of autonomous vehicles, new methods, tools and research platforms are needed. We have created a low-cost testbed consisting of electronics and software, that can be fitted on model vehicles allowing them to follow trajectories autonomously with a position accuracy of around 3 cm outdoors. The position of the vehicles is derived from sensor fusion between Real-Time Kinematic Satellite Navigation (RTK-SN), odometry and inertial measurement, and performs well within a 10 km radius from a base station. Trajectories to be followed can be edited with a custom GUI, where also several model vehicles can be controlled and visualized in real time. All software and Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) for our testbed are available as open source to make customization and development possible. Our testbed can be used for research within autonomous driving, for carrying test equipment, and other applications where low cost and accurate positioning and navigation is required. © 2018 Benjamin Vedder et al.

Cyclists are not well protected in accidents with other road users, and there are few active safety systems available for bicycles. In this study we have evaluated the use of inexpensive Real-Time Kinematic Satellite Navigation (RTK-SN) receivers with multiple satellite constellations together with dead reckoning for accurate positioning of bicycles to enable active safety functions such as collision warnings. This is a continuation of previous work were we concluded that RTK-SN alone is not sufficient in moderately dense urban areas as buildings and other obstructions degrade the performance of RTK-SN significantly. In this work we have added odometry to the positioning system as well as extending RTK-SN with multiple satellite constellations to deal with situations where the view of the sky is poor and thus fewer satellites are in view. To verify the performance of the positioning system we have used Ultra-Wideband radios as an independent positioning system to compare against while testing during poor conditions for RTK-SN. We were able to verify that adding dead reckoning and multiple satellite constellations improves the performance significantly under poor conditions and makes the positioning system more useful for active safety systems. © 2018 IEEE

Cooperative Awareness on the road is aiming to support the road users with knowledge about the surroundings relying on the information exchange enabled by vehicular com- munications. To achieve this goal European Telecommunication Standard Institute (ETSI) delivered the standard EN 302 637-2 for Cooperative Awareness Messages (CAM). The CAM trig- gering conditions are based on the dynamics of the originating vehicle, which is checked periodically. In this paper, we show that standardized ETSI protocol may demonstrate a decrease in communication performance under several realistic mobility patterns. The potential influence of the discovered phenomena on two typical mobility scenarios is studied.