Mobile World Congress: Anritsu joins collaboration to showcase connected car cloud solutions

03/04/2015

Anritsu announced that its stand at Mobile World Congress 2015 (Barcelona, 2-5 March) will feature a sophisticated, cloud-based connected car system for fleet tracking developed at the Smart Systems Laboratory, University of Hertfordshire in the UK, and demonstrated together using satellite positioning technology GNSS Simulator from Spectracom.

Anritsu’s stand (Hall 6/6F40) connected car demonstration shows a car’s diagnostics system connecting to the cloud via a simulated LTE network environment provided by Anritsu’s popular mobile network simulator, the MD8475A. An application in the cloud enables a fleet manager on any internet-connected device to view the location and operating parameters of any vehicle in the fleet in real time. The MD8475A enables the university’s development team to test, from their Hertfordshire laboratory, how the system’s in-car LTE modem would perform in mobile networks from all across the world and supporting all major worldwide standards within a single simulator. Spectracom GNSS Simulator is providing the simulation of positioning data (e.g. GPS signals) to provide location information to the system being tested.

The combination of the MD8475A and the Spectracom GNSS Simulator provides a complete test environment, to simulate any global location, and any type of cellular connectivity, to ensure correct operation of the system. This test bed highlights to the industry the effectiveness of a complete wireless test bed solution, to enable cost effective development testing, product validation, and customer experience evaluation within a single system.

The connected car system being developed is based upon the wireless transmission of the OBD (On Board Diagnostics) information available in all new vehicles to a cloud server, using cellular backhaul (LTE, 3G, GPRS), together with GPS location information. This data is then processed and the status of individual vehicles and the whole fleet is tracked on an interactive map available via the cloud to any suitable tablet, PC, or smartphone.