Evaluation of communication protocols between vehicle and server : Evaluation of data transmission overhead by communication protocols

Abstract: This thesis project has studied a number of protocols that could be used to communicate between a vehicle and a remote server in the context of Scania’s connected services. While there are many factors that are of interest to Scania (such as response time, transmission speed, and amount of data overhead for each message), this thesis will evaluate each protocol in terms of how much data overhead is introduced and how packet loss affects this overhead. The thesis begins by giving an overview of how a number of alternative protocols work and what they offer with regards to Scania’s needs. Next these protocols are compared based on previous studies and each protocol’s specifications to determine which protocol would be the best choice for realizing Scania’s connected services. Finally, a test framework was set up using a virtual environment to simulate different networking conditions. Each of the candidate protocols were deployed in this environment and setup to send sample data. The behaviour of each protocol during these tests served as the basis for the analysis of all of these protocols. The thesis draws the conclusion that to reduce the data transmission overhead between vehicles and Scania’s servers the most suitable protocol is the UDP based MQTT SN.