Gautier and his IOT infrastructure project for a large car manufacturer

14 January 2021

Have the opportunity to work on an IOT project? It's possible at CNS !

I was immediately excited by the opportunity to discover a new field and new technologies.

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You've been working on a project for a large car manufacturer for a little over a year. Could you tell us more?

I've been working on an IOT infrastructure project for a large car manufacturer. The aim of the assignment is to replace the legacy MQTT architecture with a new solution developed by Solace. This infrastructure enables messages to be sent between vehicles, servers and general public apps. The messages can carry internal sensor measurements or commands to activate vehicle mechanisms (e.g. open a door).

Given that it is vastly different from our usual assignments, what was your reaction when you were briefed on the case?

I was immediately excited by the opportunity to discover a new field and new technologies. Then I was impressed by the extent of the work required. I ramped up my skills based on the documentation provided by the customer and the maker. I also had to study the OASIS standard for the MQTT protocol. More importantly, I was able to put this knowledge into practise and build a mock-up to validate product functions.

Can you tell us how your activities have evolved since the start of the project?

The new infrastructure has been in place for several months now. My work basically entails supporting the application teams in their migration between the environments. I need to understand their specific needs and support them in developing the updates required, so that their applications comply with the new security criteria. Background work is also necessary with the RUN teams to implement monitoring of the new brokers. I also had to build a new architecture to create a priority communication channel with the partners of my customer.

You are working on a far-reaching programme which will impact the daily lives of users. Can you tell us about the services implemented through this project?

The services we propose to the general public are fairly diverse: deliver contextual data to vehicle navigation systems, collect data on an electric vehicle battery state of charge from a smartphone, or control certain onboard elements remotely. This is not limited to general public applications, and my customer is also able to build services for businesses, such as vehicle fleet managers.

As a network consultant, what is your vision of the IOT universe?

This mission has enabled me to address IoT in a practical manner. We hear a lot about connected objects, but it is rare to address them in an industrial context. The equipment we install forms a MQTT message exchange infrastructure, similar to infrastructures we find in WAN or Data centre situations. However, the protocols and standards are much more recent than we usually see, which means that sometimes we need to analyse the behaviour of MQTT exchanges more closely.

In your opinion, what skills are required to succeed on this type of assignment?

I think you have to be curious. This project requires an exchange infrastructure involving multiple elements, so we need to understand both the software issues and security challenges.

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