Vektor Telemetry Service Platform

VTSP is a common software infrastructure that facilitates rapid development of vertical, purpose-specific Telematics, LBS or M2M applications. To realize this goal the platform provides standard services that are commonly required by these types of applications.

Telematics, LBS and M2M applications retrieve, filter, aggregate, interpret and store data received from wireless access devices. This information is generally correlated with location and other information to compose compound events which may trigger certain actions such as alarms or information delivery to the devices. Otherwise the information is made available for reporting and analysis. Services that support this broad set of common requirements are identified as follows:

• Communication with wireless access devices. This service abstracts the heterogeneity between different network infrastructures, in terms of low-level, device-specific protocols, networking, or middle-ware technologies.
• Registration of known device types. The platform supports a device registry that stores information about the configuration, supported capabilities and features of the registered devices.
• Registration of organizations, users, assets and locations with the ability to group and categorize these entities. This is a structured and secured environment that provides controlled access to services based on authentication, authorization and service subscription. Access rights management can also be a platform service.
• The transformation, aggregation and correlation of data obtained from devices, with extendable asset attributes based on inference rules. This process results in asset context information.
• Management of context inference rules. For example, the latitude and longitude data obtained from a device will be associated with a vehicle's address attribute. When received, this data should be forwarded to an external service to be reverse geo-coded and the reply should be stored on the vehicles' address field together with the data time-stamp.
• Storage of asset context information. Asset context information is stored in a temporal data structure that provides access to historical information when required.
• Handle event based processes. Events may be fired by user actions or may be scheduled or triggered based on rules related to asset context data. These processes may be individual tasks such as SMS, email, phone-call type alarm notifications, configuration commands or information delivery to the devices or aggregate tasks that follow a work flow. For example a measured value outside its reference values may be considered an event that triggers a notification process that alarms another entity, such as a service, piece of equipment or a human.
• Platform allows the management of processes in the sense that it is possible to associate standard processes with asset groups. This represents the business service scope delivered to each asset group.
• It is also possible to manage the rules that trigger processes automatically.
• Warehousing of production data in order to make it available for reporting the history and analyzing the statistical properties of observed assets.
• The platform utilizes a service interface to provide the services mentioned above and interacts with various third party services such as mapping and navigation services, directory services and other location-based data services.

The diagram below depicts the discussed system model at macro level.

The Internet is utilized as the common network substrate for the whole system. In the case of an access device using the GPRS service of a GSM network or a Wifi mesh network, the communication with the VTSP is achieved directly through the Internet. In other cases when for example a satellite network or the SMS transport of the GSM network is used, IP Gateways must be deployed to close the communication loop between the access device and the VTSP. IP Gateway services are generally provided by the network service providers; however, it is also possible to use third party services or commercially sold or open source gateway applications that require a combination of hardware and software deployments. Thus the abstraction of heterogeneous bearer networks is achieved by enveloping the proprietary communication protocols of different access devices in standard Internet protocols such as TCP, UDP, HTTP or HTTP/SOAP.

VTSP combines third party LBS such as geo-coding, directory or traffic jam notification services to provide general functionality required by purpose specific vertical Telematics, LBS and M2M applications that may also be deployed remotely.

Vektor continuously looks for collaborating with the right partners either to jointly develop new telemetry applications using VTSP with partners possessing strong industry specific know how and customer reach, or to expand the reach of its existing products to new geographical markets.