UPnP-Based Telematics Service Discovery for Local Hot-Spots

Telematics services are more useful when local hot-spot services are provided by distributed third-party providers in addition to the services supplied by central telematics service providers (TSPs). In order to provide local services, it needs a telematics service discovery mechanism that a car discovers the local services automatically and uses them without a priori knowledge about the local hot-spot and its network locations. In this paper, we present an approach to utilize UPnP (universal plug and play) as a telematics service discovery mechanism for local hot-spots. And a sample telematics scenario for local services is implemented on UPnP over WLAN and examined to show that UPnP service discovery platform can be used in telematics applications. Also, we make an experiment and analyze it to study the impact of UPnP messages for service advertisements and searches on network congestion in telematics environment to verify the validness of the proposed service discovery mechanism.