Over-the-Air Software-Defined Vehicle Updates Using Federated Fog Environment

Abstract

With recent advancements in software-defined vehicles, over-the-air (OTA) software updates are crucial to roll out new software and patches for connected vehicles. Traditionally, outdated vehicles are recalled by the manufacturers, however, owners are notoriously difficult to reach with recall notices. Also, organizational and procedural challenges result in many outdated vehicles with insecure and unstable software. In this paper, we propose a dissemination framework for OTA updates using a federated fog environment. Pushing the update to all vehicles via the fog nodes may congest the network, leading up to a single-point failure for update dissemination, as well as, disruption to other installed services at the fog nodes. We propose a software-defined mechanism to select a pivot, which gets the update from the fog node and streams it to other vehicles. Moreover, a timer-barrier mechanism is proposed to identify any malicious vehicles that are barred from participating in pivot selection. The experimental evaluation demonstrates that the proposed scheme improves network convergence time by 40% with 95% node trustworthiness.