(IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security, 13

Vol. 2, No. 3, March 2010

Towards In-Car Ad Hoc Network for Pervasive

Multimedia Services
Kamal Sharma1, Hemant Sharma2 and Dr. A K Ramani3
1
Institute of Computer Science & IT, Devi Ahilya University,
Indore (M.P.), India
kamal.sharma74@rediffmail.com
2
Software Architect, Delphi Delco Electronics & safety Europe GmbH,
Tec Centre, D 31162 Bad Salzdetfurth, Germany
hemant.sharma@delphi.com
3
Prof. & Head, 1Institute of Computer Science & IT, Devi Ahilya University,
Indore (M.P.), India
ramani.scs@dauniv.ac.in

Abstract: Pervasive computing systems inside modern
automobiles are made up of hundreds of interconnected, often
replaceable devices and software components. In-vehicle
multimedia components and applications are becoming complex
artifacts due to advancement in technology and increased
competition. There is a growing need for software platform to
enable efficient deployment of multimedia services in
automotive environment. This paper presents the architecture of
a Bluetooth based multimedia ad hoc network in a car. The
architecture is explained and presented together with a prototype
implementation running on hand-held devices. Further, the
different fundamental architectural tradeoffs, based on
measurements, have also been analyzed.
Keywords: Ad Hoc Networks, Pervasive Computing, In
Vehicle Multimedia, Bluetooth.
1. Introduction
During the last few years, the proliferation of miniaturized
devices with networking capabilities has provided the
technological grounds for pervasive networking even in
automotive environments. Growing demand for personal
device connectivity, mobile Internet access, remote
monitoring and diagnostics, as well as enhanced safety and
security is driving vehicle manufacturers and suppliers to
seek out new wireless technologies. Wireless technology
integration strategies would enhance the value proposition
of vehicles by integrating advanced electronics systems such
as infotainment systems, safety and stability systems, and
comfort and convenience enhancement systems.
The evolutionary development of in-car electronic systems
has lead to a significant increase of the number of
connecting cables within a car. To reduce the amount of
cabling and to simplify the interworking of dedicated
devices, currently appropriate wired bus systems are being
considered. These systems are related with high costs and
effort regarding the installation of cables and accessory
components. Thus, wireless systems are a flexible and very
advanced alterative to wired connections.
However, the realization of a fully wireless car bus system is
still far away. Fiber optic connections for multimedia bus
systems offer advantages regarding costs and bandwidth,
and the demanded reliability of mission-critical networks
still require wired connections to ensure the safe operation
of the car. Though, cost-effective wireless subsystems which
could extend or partly replace wired bus systems are already
nowadays conceivable. A very promising technology in this
context is specified by the recent Bluetooth 3.0 [1] standard.
The provisioning of multimedia streaming applications
using wireless network, inside the vehicle, requires
managing differentiated performance levels depending on
application/user/device requirements in order to properly
allocate network bandwidth, especially the limited one
available in the wireless last-meter [3]. In particular, the
Bluetooth specification [1] offers limited support to
performance differentiation, by allowing to choose which of
the three kind of logical transports to exploit and to
statically configure performance requirements for ACL
ones.
In addition, current implementations of the Bluetooth
software stack do not allow applications to exploit the
limited performance functions included in the specification
in a portable way. The result is that the development of
Bluetooth operations in multimedia ad hoc applications
currently depends on specific implementation details of the
target Bluetooth hardware/software platform. This
relevantly complicates service design and implementation,
limits the portability of developed applications, and calls for
the adequate modeling of performance parameters
corresponding to potential ad hoc applications and services.
The design presented in this paper is for a wireless
streaming system that offers a means for bringing the
participatory media and bulk content distribution into the
wireless domain. The basis for the service is an
opportunistic distribution of among network. Users in our
system exchange data when their corresponding
application(s) receive trigger. The system is going to be
14 (IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security,
Vol. 2, No. 3, March 2010

open to any node who wants to provide and consume the

content. Hence, it is based on unlicensed short-range
communication specifically Bluetooth.

Figure 1. Overview of In- Car Multimedia Network

By relying on short-range communication, the network will
be highly disrupted most of time. The communication is
further challenged by relatively short transfer opportunities
which might be in the range of a few seconds when for
example two nodes communicate with each other. The
contribution of this paper is twofold:
Ø A mechanism for content streaming based on
opportunistic communication;
Ø An evaluation of the mechanism through the
use of realistic use cases and real traces.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2
provides the description of system and potential application
scenarios. In section 3, the architecture and design of the
system has been discussed. Section 4 evaluates the design of
the system. Section 5 provides an overview of related
research and section 6 concludes the paper.
2.1 The Multimedia PAN
Bluetooth technology is based on a master-slave concept
where the master device controls data transmissions through
a polling procedure. The master is defined as the device that
initiates the connection. A collection of slave devices
associated with a single master device is referred to as a
piconet. The master dictates packet transmissions within a
piconet according to a time-slot process. The channel is
divided into time slots that are numbered according to an
internal clock running on the master. A time division
duplex (TDD) scheme is used where the master and slaves
alternatively transmit packets, where even numbered time
slots are reserved for master-slave transmissions, while odd
numbered time slots are reserved for slave-master
transmissions.

2. System Description

An ad hoc multimedia network in a car and participating

devices are shown in figure 1. The diagram presents an ad
hoc network containing a smart phone, an infotainment
system, and rear seat entertainment system. The devices are
equipped with Bluetooth module and are capable of
establishing a Bluetooth connection. A piconet can be
established between Infotainment system and iPhone when
the driver or any other occupant of the vehicle pairs the
phone. Similarly a piconet could be established between
Infotainment system and rear seat entertainment system.
The piconet shall enable sharing of iPhone data or access to
information from internet, if appropriate application
framework is available at infotainment system.
Figure 2. The Multimedia PAN
 (IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security, 15
Figure 2 provides an overview of the multimedia PAN
inside the car with the role of different nodes. The piconet
here consists of a master, the infotainment device, and two
slaves, the smart phone (iPhone) and rear-seat
entertainment device. As soon as the infotainment system is
Figure 3. Overview of Ad Hoc Multimedia Communication Architecture.
2.2 Application Scenarios
The ad hoc multimedia network consisting of Infotainment
system and the slave devices shall provide following
services:
Ø Access to audio streams from iPhone to
infotainment system that could be played and
hearable on the vehicle’s sound system.
Ø Access to video streams from iPhone to rear- seat
entertainment unit via the piconet master.
Ø Access to internet from rear-seat unit using iPhone
via the piconet master.
Ø Applications based on information received by the
iPhone to help safe driving, such as weather
information or traffic information.
3. System Architecture and Implementation
This section describes the design and implementation of our
Ad Hoc network system. We first give a brief overview, then
describe the system architecture, and finally discuss the
protocols involved in a pair-wise association when devices
in the network communicate.
3.1 System Architecture
The architecture organizes application data into
communication channels to facilitate identification and the
Vol. 2, No. 3, March 2010
up and running, its Bluetooth module is ready to pair with
other available device. Pairing with iPhone or with rear-seat
entertainment unit or with both establishes the network.
communication of intended data streams. Therefore, every
application subscribes to the channels that it is interested in,
and his corresponding device node will try to retrieve any
data belonging to those channels. Following the approach
used in the Internet-based podcasting protocols; the
framework structures channels into different media streams.
To make efficient use of contacts with a small duration, the
streams are further divide into data packets, transport-level
data units of a size that can typically be downloaded in an
individual node encounter. Each data stream is further
divided into protocol data units (PDU), the atomic transport
unit of the network.
The resulting system architecture is illustrated in Figure 3.
The transport layer acts directly on top of the link-layer
without any routing layer. To distribute information among
the communicating nodes, the framework does not rely on
any explicit multi-hop routing scheme. Instead of explicitly
routing the data through specific nodes, it relies on a
receiver-driven application-level dissemination model,
where data content are routed implicitly as nodes retrieve
information that they request from neighboring nodes. It
distinguishes between an application layer, a transport layer,
and the data link layer. In a first level of aggregation, the
application organizes the data in media stream channels.
Below the application layer, the transport layer organizes
the data into data streams. Streams are smaller data units
that should be able to communicate over short contacts. The
use of smaller file blocks is also supported by the idea of
integrating forward error correction, for instance the use of
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Vol. 2, No. 3, March 2010

fountain codes, to speed up and secure the data transfer,
specifically when packets are received unordered. The
streams packets themselves are then again cut into smaller
parts to optimize the interaction with the data link layer;
i.e., the size is set to the PDU size of the data link layer.
The proposed system is designed to work on any MAC
architecture, however, to be effective even in the presence of
short contact durations, short setup times and high data
rates are important for achieving high application
communication throughput. The design is further
characterized by two fundamental choices.
synchronization. The transfer mode is based on a client-
server model. The communication protocol is a request-
response system. It is not a strict system though; some
requests do not generate a response whereas other requests
can generate several responses. The goal is to send as few
data packets as possible to reduce the communication
overhead.
Figure 4 illustrates the state diagram of the transfer mode.
It shows the three most important stages of synchronization
between two device nodes: the negotiation, data query, and
data communication stage.

Ø First, it allows only pair wise associations even In the Negotiation stage, both devices determine if some of
when the MAC layer supports multi-point the subscribed channels are available on the other device.
communication. Instead of querying every single channel, the devices
Ø Second, it never pushes data in the network and exchange a channel filter that contains all channel
relies instead on receiver-driven dissemination. subscriptions a device offers. The devices then start to test
their subscribed channels against the filter of the other
The arguments for these two choices are simplicity and
device and create a list of matching channels. This is a local
optimal usage of short contact durations. Furthermore, the
transport layer is able to optimize the flow control between process and does not involve the exchange of messages.
the nodes and is not constrained by the slowest receiver in
range. Since the framework does not perform multi-hop
routing explicitly, the system performance is mainly
determined by the selection of nodes, it is synchronizing
with and the order by which it transfers data from the peers.
This task is performed by the synchronization service,
depicted in Figure 1. The synchronization service is
responsible for maintaining state about past synchronization
encounters and current devices in the PAN.

3.2 Association Phases

This section next describes the process when two nodes

associate. The framework differentiates two phases: a
discovery phase in which nodes detect that they are in a
range and a data exchange phase in which the nodes
negotiate and perform data transfer.

1) Device Discovery Phase

We assume that every device that participates in the

opportunistic data sharing belongs to the same network,
e.g., with IEEE 802.15 every device is configured in ad hoc
mode. While the detection of new devices in the network is
handled by the MAC layer, the application in the nodes has
to take care of the discovery of devices that participate in the
wireless communication service.
Figure 4. State Diagram – Data Transfer Modes.
The synchronization service keeps track of the discovery
messages received from each peer and maintains a history In the Data Query stage, a device confirms the channels
list. An important aspect of the discovery process is to selected in the previous stage and then retrieves a list of
identify peers with a good connection. Since the system is streams offered by the remote device within those channels.
designed for ad hoc scenarios, it has to consider the specifics Our implementation supports three different types of stream
of wireless communication. retrievals:
2) Data Transfer Phase
1. The peer requests any random stream within a
Once a device node has been detected, the synchronization channel that the remote peer offers.
services switches to the transfer mode which handles the
 (IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security, 17
Vol. 2, No. 3, March 2010

2. A peer requests any stream which is newer than a 4.3 Device Synchronization
given date starting with the newest streams.
We next look at the synchronization time. The
3. The peer requests any streams that are newer than
synchronization time is the time between the moment two
a given date starting with the oldest stream.
devices have discovered each other and associate until they
The actual communication of streams is handled in the Data start data communication. Figure 5 shows the performance
Communication stage which usually takes up most of the of the architecture for device synchronization with different
connection time. The device starts to process the list of PDU number of channels using channel filters compared to the
streams that was created in the previous stage. The time it would take without filters.
communication itself works analogous to the download
process of BitTorrent [7]. Missing PDUs which are available
at the remote peer are randomly selected and downloaded.
Remark that a stream is divided into several pieces (PDUs)
which are requested

4. Evaluation

This section evaluates important design choices of the

proposed architecture as well as the performance we might
expect from a wireless opportunistic application and content
sharing service. Our evaluation relies on our prototype
implementation and focuses on typical deployment scenarios
in which: Figure 5. Device Synchronization with and with out
channel filter.
Ø the nodes are co-located (e.g., all devices are in
the car) ; or 4.4 Data Transfer
Ø When nodes are not co-located (paired iPhone The system limits the association time to ensure that the
is not in the car).
system remains fair when multiple nodes are interested in
the data provided by just a few nodes. Without this artificial
4.1 Evaluation Setup and Methodology
limit, the first node that associates with the node having
All devices communicated over their integrated Bluetooth new data content would be able to communicate for an
interface (802.15) turned into ad hoc mode. Our data indefinite amount of time, letting the other nodes starve for
data.
communication application is written in C++. The devices
that participate in the data communication system are
configured in ad hoc mode using the same identifier. .

We evaluated the framework’s accuracy by comparing its

data flows to actual Bluetooth flows between the same
devices. Performing this evaluation on a large-scale is
difficult because it requires control over the software
running at both end-points of a Bluetooth flow. We
performed our evaluation by pre-instrumented Bluetooth
stack of two classes of devices: Infotainment Unit and
iPhone.

4.2 Device Discovery Phase

An important aspect of opportunistic wireless podcasting is

the discovery time. The discovery time is the time between
the moment two nodes move into transmission range until
they discover each other at the application layer and start
the synchronization phase.
Figure 6. Average Data Exchange Time between the PAN
This time is directly impacted by the interval at which the devices
messages are sent. The more frequent these messages are
sent, the quicker they will discover each other and be able to To show how our implementation performs on different
transfer data streams. PAN nodes, Figure 6 shows a comparison of the download
18
time with the iPhone and the Infotainment unit. The results
are from average data communication measurements of
around 12 MB video streams showing the download time
when two or five devices are part of the PAN inside the car.
4.5 PAN Accuracy
When sending data to multiple receivers, a Bluetooth master
must form a piconet. In a piconet, the master sends data to
each receiver one packet at a time in a round-robin fashion.
To evaluate architecture’s accuracy in piconet mode, we
performed the following experiment. We set up a sending
device to transmit a very large video file to each slave
joining its piconet. We set up two iPhone as slaves to join
the piconet one by one, every 90 seconds. We measure the
transfer rate of the initial flow established between the
master and the first joining slave and we plot how this rate
changes over time in Figure 7.
Figure 7. Data communicate rate in PAN scenario, when
iPhone and Infotainment Unit has been paired.
Our results demonstrate that framework is accurate: its
emulate flows behave similarly to Bluetooth flows with
respect to the number of packets exchanged and packet
sizes. Finally, we found that framework is accurate when
running in piconet mode.
5. Related Research
Bluetooth is a low-cost technology initially designed for
cable replacement [4] but more generally intended for all
kinds of Personal Area Network (PAN) applications [5]. It is
probable that, in the very near future, Bluetooth will be
embedded in almost every mobile device. These features
coupled with the interoperability characteristic provided by
Bluetooth specifications [1], make this wireless technology
very appealing for applications in automotive environments
[2]. As an example, Bluetooth headsets are very popular as
wireless audio link to a mobile phone, also for vehicular use.
These reasons make Bluetooth the most suited technology
for the design of the low power Wireless Communication
Network (WCN).
There has been substantial work on peer-to-peer content
distribution for the wireless network and Internet.
BitTorrent is a successful instance of such systems where
(IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security,
Vol. 2, No. 3, March 2010
users who retrieve data act simultaneously as clients and
servers. It has post-facto gained interest in the research
community; see for instance [7]. This system has similarities
to BitTorrent [7], but the mobility assisted delivery means
that data are provided in a random order from a random mix
of peers whereas peer-to-peer content distribution systems
like BitTorrent selects peers based on specific rules. The
closest research field is the delay tolerant networking. The
Delay Tolerant Network Research Group (DTNRG) [14] has
proposed architecture [13] to support communication that
may be used by delay tolerant applications. The architecture
consists mainly of the addition of an overlay, called the
bundle layer, above a network transport layer. Messages of
any size are transferred in bundles in an atomic fashion that
ensures node-to-node reliability. Multicast for delay-tolerant
networks has been proposed in [12]. In contrast to multicast,
our work assumes open user groups. The info-station
concept is akin to our proposal and the paper in Ref. [10]
studies means for avoiding exploitation of other nodes. We
differ in that we make the nodal exchanges governed by a
protocol instead of a social contract between users.
In reference [9], it has been shown that delay-tolerant
broadcasting between mobile nodes results in sufficiently
high application level throughput even for streaming. This
is the case in urban pedestrian areas with reasonably high
densities of users, as well as in public transportation and in
places where people gather occasionally (e.g., sport fields,
shopping malls, recreational areas). Contact patterns of
human mobility have been analyzed in the Haggle project
[6]. This project aims at developing an application-
independent networking architecture for delay-tolerant
networks. In contrast, we implement the podcasting service
directly on top of the link layer to exploit application-
specific policies in the way information spreads across the
mobile users.
BlueTorrent [8] is a cooperative content sharing system for
Bluetooth. It differs from our approach in the search
mechanisms and the content structuring. We rely on a
channel-based content structure with a subscription model
whereas BlueTorrent employs flat structuring with
traditional query string search. TACO-DTN [11] is a
content-based dissemination system for delay tolerant
networks. It is implemented as a publish/subscribe system
and was mainly designed to distribute temporal events
whereas our approach is implemented as a pure receiver-
driven system and optimized for dissemination of streaming
media. We use bloom filters in the searching for data; a
survey of the use of bloom filters in networking is given in
[15].
6. Conclusions
We presented, in this paper, architecture of wireless
opportunistic communication network for In-vehicle
multimedia application. The prototype implementation is
targeted at devices that communicate over IEEE 802.15. We
have evaluated different tradeoffs in the discovery,
synchronization, and data communication phases.
 (IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security, 19
The overall resulting performance is promising and shows
the feasibility of wireless opportunistic communication
inside a vehicle. With the proposed opportunistic
communication system, the scope of multimedia content
exchange may broaden and that new participatory wireless
broadcasting applications using the proposed concepts will
emerge in the near future.
We anticipate two main directions for the future work:
Ø Develop analytical models for relevant measures
of performance for the described ad hoc network.
Ø Performance analysis of multimedia protocol for
different multimedia resources and performance
attributes.
References
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Authors Profile
Kamal Sharma received the M. Sc. (Electronics) and M. Tech.
(Future Studies & Planning) degrees from Devi Ahilya University
in 2002 and 2005, respectively. He is currently with Devi Ahilya
University, Indore, INDIA.
Hemant Sharma received the M. Sc., M. Tech. and Ph D
degrees from Devi Ahilya University in 1996, 1998 and 2009,
respectively. He is in to designing and developing platform
architecture for In-vehicle Infotainment Systems for more than 10
years. He is currently with Delphi Delco Electronics Europe
GmbH, Germany.
Dr. A. K. Ramani received his Master of Engineering (Digital
Systems) and Ph. D, from Devi Ahilya University, Indore. He
worked as a research engineer in ISRO Satellite Center, Dept. of
Space, Bangalore, India, during 1979-83. Since Jan. 1990, he is a
professor with the School of Computer Science at Devi Ahilya
University. He was associate professor at University Putra
Malaysia, Dept. of Computer Science during May95 toMay99.
During Sept 2005- July 2006, He was with the College of
Computer Science and Information Technology, at King Faisal
University (KFU), Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He has guided 13
PhDs in different areas of Computer Science and Information
Technology and has authored about 70 research papers.