Towards a 3-tier architecture for connected vehicles

In this paper, we consider scenarios, requirements, and architectures for future connected vehicles. Regarding scenarios, we discuss new features like autonomous driving, which have very strong requirements on sensor data fusion, real-time processing, and the complexity of the decision making process. We also address a major trend in automotive architectures, which is the aggregation of computing inside the vehicle. Furthermore, we consider connected vehicles, where functionality can be taken over by the cloud. This leads to new challenges with respect to allocation of real-time data processing and control as well as the distribution of the strategy layer across the tiers. To address the challenges of these novel scenarios, we propose a 3-tier architecture for future connected vehicles.