SWICOM: An SDR-Based Wireless Communication Gateway for Vehicles

A wide range of emerging and promising wireless communication protocols are rapidly being introduced into vehicles. They are commonly used for in-car infotainment, telematics, and safety applications. However, adopting new wireless communications into vehicles requires them to be equipped with the corresponding hardware devices. This hardware dependency incurs extra costs to customers to deploy and maintain wireless services in vehicles. To alleviate this problem, this paper proposes a novel wireless communication gateway for vehicles that is called the software-defined radio (SDR)-based wireless communication gateway (SWICOM). It exploits the SDR technology that uses software running on a generic hardware platform to perform signal processing instead of dedicated hardware. The SWICOM can thus integrate multiple wireless hardware devices into a single generic wireless gateway device, which improves flexibility, adaptability, and connectivity of wireless communications. We built its prototype implementation and performed measurements to quantify its run-time performance. The worst-case execution time (WCET) analysis is also given using synchronous data flow (SDF) graphs. All entire results clearly show the viability of the SWICOM.