Networking In-Vehicle Entertainment Devices with HAVi

Abstract

Modern in-vehicle telematics systems typically integrate a broad range of entertainment features, like AM/FM radio, TV, and CD/MP3/ DVD players, with advanced navigation and communication features and present them to the user through a consistent automotive-adequate interface. In the future, passengers will be able to access and control these features independently through their own consoles. For the required high-speed automotive-grade internetworking, the industry has established the MOST (Media Oriented Systems Transport) standard. This standard specifies the physical layer up to the network management layer together with a set of application oriented device interfaces. For distributed applications, however, the standard lacks an appropriate middleware layer. HAVi (Home Audio/Video Interoperability) is a carefully designed middleware standard that allows IEEE 1394 (Firewire) based devices to interoperate. In this paper, we show that HAVi can be adapted to the MOST bus. In particular, we describe in detail the essential changes to the HAVi standard that are required to use HAVi as a middleware layer on top of MOST.