ICAR Hybrid Network: A Smart In-vehicle Network for ScudWare

Ubiquitous computing is a hotspot research field at present. The research aboutsmart in-vehicle space is a main domain in ubiquitous computing. As cars play increasinglyimportant role in people’s daily life, smart in-vehicle space has become an essential researchfield in Smart Space. The intelligence of cars is achieved by the cooperation of in-vehicleelectronic systems, which can be classified into six subsystems with great difference inphysical media, network topologies and real-time requirements. Making all the in-vehicleelectronic subsystems into a uniform network is a key problem in Smart Car. ScudWare is ahierarchical architecture of smart in-vehicle space. In this paper, we present ICAR HybridNetwork, the communication layer of ScudWare. It is based on J1939, IDB1394 andEthernet and has a central control unit and some subsystems responsible for differentfunctions. Different agents resident in these subsystems and communicate with each other.We first introduce the structure and functions of ICAR Hybrid Network. Then we analyzethe typical interaction relations between agents and people. After that, scheduling issuesamong agents’ interactions are also analyzed. We assign different priorities to the agents andthe preemptive scheduling algorithm based on priority is used to schedule agents in ICARHybrid Network. A new method called the lazy response mechanism is put forward tooptimize scheduling of agents and smooth the fluctuation of running states of cars. Finally,we give an example to describe how an agent interacts with people and other agents in acomplete driving process. ICAR Hybrid Network makes people interact with the intelligentsmart in-vehicle space naturally and complete driving task with ease.