The use of wireless technologies for in-vehicle communication networks interconnecting smart sensors, actuators, gateways and electronic control units offers several advantages such as reduced weight, reduced cabling efforts and reduced installation time.  However, for automotive or more general industrial applications, engineers often utilize wired connections because they don’t have confidence in potential wireless solutions providing sufficient throughput and robustness under all circumstances. In addition, wireless communication is in many perceptions placed into context with lower security.

In SCOTT we will develop mechanisms and frameworks fostering the use of as well as significantly increasing trust in wireless technologies by supporting engineers planning, setting up, utilizing and monitoring secure, robust and reliable wireless network in an automotive environment.

The DEWI project resulted in a demonstration of state of the art wireless in-vehicle networks (IVNs). These networks will provide the required robustness and quality-of-service (QoS) to their applications in an automotive environment. However, their resource utilization to achieve this robustness and QoS, will not yet have been optimized, and may therefore still contain inefficiencies that lead to a relatively high cost for a wireless solution. Furthermore, these networks may still be susceptible to certain types of attacks and impacted by the co-existence of other, possible heterogeneous IVNs in their vicinity.
In SCOTT we will develop a static and dynamic resource optimization framework for wireless networks allowing to optimize the resource utilization of a wireless IVN and to define a common technique to coordinate their operation, to ultimately drive down the cost of the entire system.

Contrary to DEWI we will not only focus on permanent wireless IVNs, where the wireless nodes are mounted during vehicle assembly, but also on temporary mounted sensors, only used within a vehicle for a short period to support different measurement and evaluation campaigns. Thereby we will focus on smart mechanisms for fast and easy sensor deployment and provide a framework supporting the sensor deployment and network commissioning.