Validation of a vehicle emulation platform supporting OBD-II communications

In the next few years, important developments are expected in the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) area. One of the key issues enabling future solutions is achieving an effective integration between mobile apps and vehicles. Such integration can be efficiently achieved on all existing vehicles by relying on the On Board Diagnostic (OBD-II) interface. This allows obtaining critical information such as speed, fuel consumption, gas emissions and system failures. In this paper we propose a vehicle emulation platform, called VEWE, that allows developing and testing OBD-II aware applications. The advantages of this approach include: avoiding the need for a real vehicle, allowing to easily generate realistic vehicle parameter patterns, and supporting emulated GPS functionality. We evaluate our platform by conducting a performance analysis in terms of OBD-II response times and channel capacity when relying on a Bluetooth adapter. We compare our results with respect to those obtained in real vehicles, and demonstrate that our VEWE platform behaves similarly to realistic on board devices, thereby providing a complete and reliable platform for smartphone application development.