Companies co-operate on secure vehicle-to-x communication

The wireless technology significantly improves road safety by alerting drivers of critical traffic situations well beyond the range of current production sensors, allowing drivers to 'see' around corners, and through traffic obstacles such as big trucks ahead.

“HARMAN leads the industry as an end-to-end system integrator for automakers and technology suppliers to provide drivers intelligent, adaptable and predictive solutions in the car. We are proud to collaborate with NXP for a flexible and secure V2X solution as part of our leading compute platform to dramatically improve not only safety, but comfort and convenience,” said Phil Eyler, President, HARMAN Connected Car Division. “From easing traffic congestion to improving fuel efficiency, HARMAN is seamlessly integrating V2X capabilities into our connected car solutions for the benefit of automakers and drivers alike”.

V2X allows alerts to be delivered to vehicles from other cars and surrounding infrastructure, such as traffic lights and signage to warn drivers about potentially hazardous traffic situations ahead. The technology can detect hazards beyond the line of sight, even in difficult weather conditions, thus optimally complementing ADAS like radar or cameras. Messages can include blind-intersection collisions, road condition hazards, road works, presence of emergency vehicles, stationary or slow moving vehicles, traffic jams and accident warnings, as well as traffic signals or signage indicators.

“We are very pleased that HARMAN has selected NXP RoadLINK for their connected car compute platform, recognising the reliability, performance, and long range of our communications technology,” says Torsten Lehmann, Senior Vice President Car Infotainment and Driver Assistance, NXP. “This is another major milestone in NXP’s strategy to make traffic safer, smoother and cleaner, avoiding accidents and saving lives. NXP V2X chipsets will be on the road later this year in first OEM series cars.”

The V2X solution demonstrated by HARMAN and NXP as part of HARMAN’s Life-Enhancing Intelligent Vehicle Solution (LIVS) automotive compute platform is very reliable and provides real-time performance. It operates on IEEE 802.11p, a wireless communication standard designed for the needs of the automotive industry as it directly connects surrounding infrastructure and vehicles to each other in ad-hoc networks based on proximity to achieve immediate transmission and ensure reliable road safety communications.

The V2X communication is protected against illegal attacks by NXP's V2X hardware security module and HARMAN’s comprehensive 5+1 safety architecture with hypervisor and firewall as an indispensable basis for all technologies and services, including OTA (Over the Air) update capabilities. The V2X application software runs on the i.MX 6Solo applications processor from NXP – a feature- and performance-scalable platform.